Читать книгу The Haunters of the Silences: A Book of Animal Life - Sir Charles G. D. Roberts - Страница 5

"SOME ONE ON DECK DISCERNED THE CROUCHING BEAR."

The young bear, as soon as he recovered himself, became the admiration of the whole ship's company. His coat was rich and fine, its whiteness tinged with a faint golden dye. His teeth and claws were perfect, and in the small, inscrutable eyes with which he followed the business of the ship gleamed an unusual intelligence. Nevertheless, though he showed no ill-temper, no one, not even his kind attendant the cook, could penetrate his impregnable reserve. To each individual who approached him he showed complete indifference, while, on the contrary, his interest in whatever was going on seemed unfailing. Chained to an iron stanchion near the galley, he would stand swaying from side to side and swinging his narrow, snake-like head for hours. But nothing that took place, alow or aloft, escaped his keen observation. His indifference was plainly not stupidity, so every one on the ship, from the captain down, regarded him with vast respect. When at length, after a quiet voyage, the ship reached port, this respect was enhanced by the price which he commanded from the directors of the zoological gardens.

Now began for the young bear a life which, after the first annoying novelty of it had worn off, almost broke his spirit by its cramped monotony. His iron cage was spacious,—for a cage,—and built under the shadow of a leaning rock; and a spring-fed pool at the base of the rock kept the heat of the southern summer from growing utterly intolerable. But the staring, grinning crowds which passed endlessly before the bars of his cage filled him with weary rage; and day by day a fiercer homesickness clutched at his heart. The food which his keeper gave him he ate greedily enough, but through some inexplicable caprice he scorned the peanuts which the crowd kept throwing to him through the bars. He saw the other bears, in neighbouring cages, devour these small, dry things and beg for more; but he would have none of them. He was ceaselessly irritated, too, by the noisy sparrows which would flit impudently within a foot of his nose; and once in a while the stroke of his inescapable paw would descend upon one of them, easing for the moment his sense of injury. Such small trophies he would eat with a relish which the choicest of his jailers' gifts could not excite. The only moments when his homesick heart could even pretend to forget its longing for the desolate spaces, the lifeless rock ridges, the little, snow-rimmed flower valleys, and the call of the eternal ice, were when, in the solitary lilac-gray of dawn, he wallowed unobserved in his sweetly chilly pool, and dreamed that the barking of the seals from their tank across the garden was the authentic voice of his lost home. But the coming of the first drowsy attendants would shatter this illusion, and send him back under his rock to stand sullenly swaying and swinging his head all day.

In this way the summer dragged along, and then the fine, dry fall; and instead of becoming reconciled the young bear grew more moody. His appetite began to fail and his fine coat lose its live, elastic quality. The keepers were disappointed in him. At first they had expected to win him over easily, because of his apparent amenableness and that look of intelligence in his eyes. But now they gave him up as an irreconcilable, and set themselves to keep him from pining away.

When winter came with raw rains, and sleet, and some sharp frosts, the exile sniffed the air hopefully for a few days, then relapsed into a deeper gloom. Then came a flurry of snow. As the great flakes fell about him he grew wild with excitement, running with uplift head about his cage, plunging in and out of the pool, and rearing himself against the bars in a sort of play. While the flurry lasted he saw no one, and forgot to eat. But in a day this tender snow had vanished, and he found no sufficient consolation in the thin ice which came afterward to encrust the edges of his pool. He seemed to feel himself cheated in his dearest hopes, and grew more obstinately dejected than ever; till finally came days when nothing would persuade him from the deepest corner of his den. Some of the attendants thought this meant no more than the drowsiness which, in his own home, might precede the desire for hibernation. But one, more understanding of the wild kindreds than the rest, declared that it was the very disease of homesickness, and that the exile was eating his own heart out for desire of his frozen north.

The city of the young bear's exile was not so far south but that sometimes, once in a long while, it found itself in the track of a wandering northern blizzard. One day, with terrific suddenness, on the heels of a gusty thaw, such a blizzard came. In half an hour the pool was frozen and a fine snow was drifting in fierce whirls about the cage.

The unhappy bear lifted his head and looked forth from his den. But he was not going to let himself again be cheated. He had no faith in this alien storm; and turning his back upon it, he once more buried his nose between his paws.

Meanwhile the cold deepened swiftly; the wind grew savage and shrieked over the cages and the roofs; and the snow, dry and hard like the driven needles of the Arctic night, thickened so that one could not see ten paces before his nose. Through the throbbing drift the attendants went hurrying about the open cages, fixing shelter for the animals that needed it. The cold, the savage noises of the wind, the sharp buffets of snow that struck into his den, at last brought the bear to his feet. He turned slowly, and came out into the storm.

He found himself, now, actually alone, and in what seemed almost his own world. This storm was convincing. He could not refuse to believe in the icy driven crystals which cut so deliciously upon his tongue and against his open jaws. This was really snow, that whirled and heaped about him. This was really ice, which crashed about him as he plunged in and out of his pool. Around and around his cage he romped, biting the snow in ecstasy, rolling in it, breathing it, whimpering to it. When his keeper came and looked in at him with wonder, and spoke to him with sympathetic comprehension, he neither saw nor heard. To his eyes the storm was volleying over the illimitable fields of the ice. In his ears the raving of the wind held the crash of grinding floes. To his heart it was the summons of the north,—and suddenly his heart answered. He stood still, with a strange bewilderment in his eyes, as if transfixed by some kind of tremendous shock. Then he swayed on his legs; and sank in a lifeless heap by the drifted brink of his pool.