When I awoke I found that it was indeed all true, but I was so frightfully stiff that it was not easy to be very happy all at once. I slept straight on all through the morning until late in the afternoon. My new companion had been awake, and had wandered round a little in the early morning, but without awaking me. When I awoke in the afternoon she was asleep by my side. I tried to stand up, but every bone in my body hurt, every muscle ached, and every joint was so stiff that I could almost hear it creak. The fuss that I made in trying to get on to my feet disturbed her, and she helped me up. Somehow I managed to stagger along, and we went off for a short ramble in search of food. I could hardly dig at all, but she shared with me the roots she found, and with a few berries we made a sort of a meal; and then I was so tired that we lay down again, and I slept right on till daybreak the following morning.

[135]

After that I felt myself again. It was days before all the stiffness wore off, and weeks before my wounds were entirely healed; while, as you can see, I carry some of the scars to this day.

For some days the bear that I had beaten hung about, in the hope of tempting Wooffa (that was what I called my wife, it being my mother’s name) to go back to him. But he was a pitiable object, limping about with his broken leg, and I never even offered to fight him again. There was no need for it. Wooffa did not wish to have anything to say to him, and she ignored him for the most part unless he came too near, when she growled at him in a way that was not to be misunderstood. I really felt sorry for him, remembering my own loneliness, and realizing that it was probably worse to lose her and have to go off alone, while she belonged to somebody else, than never to have known her at all. After a while he recognised that it was hopeless, and we saw him no more. We ourselves, indeed, did not stay in the same place, but as long as the summer lasted we wandered where we pleased.

We suited each other admirably, Wooffa and I. We had much the same tastes, with equal cause to hate man and to wish to keep away from his neighbourhood,[136] and we were very nearly of the same size and strength. I never knew a bear that had a keener scent, and she was a marvel at finding honey. In many ways it is a great advantage for two bears to be together, for they have two noses and two sets of eyes and ears, and two can turn over a log or a stone that is too heavy for one. Altogether, I now lived better and was much more free from care than I had been; while above all was the great fact of companionship—the mere not being alone. In small ways she used to tyrannize over me, just as mother did over father; but I liked it, and neither of us ever found any tit-bit which was large enough to share without being willing to go halves with the other.

The rest of that summer we spent together, and all the next, and I think she was as contented as I. What I had hoped came true, for I increased in weight so much that I do not think there was a bear that we saw that could have held his own against me in fair fight. Certainly there was no pair that could have stood up against Wooffa and me together; for though not quite so high at the shoulder as I, she was splendidly built and magnificently strong. On her chest she had a white spot or streak, of which she was very proud, and[137] which she kept always beautifully white and well combed.

Early in the summer of the year after I had met her, I took her to visit my childhood home. It needed a week’s steady travelling to get there, and when we arrived in the neighbourhood we found the whole place so changed that I could hardly find my way. It was more than three years since I had seen it, and man had now taken possession of the whole country. For the last day or two of our journey we had to go very carefully, for men’s houses were scattered along the banks of every stream, and wherever two streams of any size came together there had grown up a small town. In the burnt district many of the blackened trees were still standing, but the ground was carpeted with brush again, and young trees were shooting up in every direction. The beaver-dams were most of them broken, and those which remained were deserted. On all sides were the marks of man’s handiwork.

At last we came to the beaver-dam, the pool of which had saved my life in the fire. There were houses close beside the pool, and a large clearing which had been made in the forest was now a grass-field, and in that field for the first time[138] I saw cows. We had already passed several strings of mules and ponies on the mountain-paths which the men had made, each animal carrying a huge bundle lashed on its back; and now we met horses dragging carts along the wide road which had been made along the border of the stream. Of course, we did not venture near the road during the day, but stayed hidden well up on the mountain-side, where we could hear the noise of people passing, and in the evening we made our way down.

Just as we arrived at the road, going very cautiously, a pair of horses dragging a waggon came along. Curious to see it, we stayed close by, and peered out from behind the trees; but as they came abreast of us a gust of wind blew the scent of us to the horses, and they took fright and seemed to go mad in one instant. Plunging and rearing, they tried to turn round, backing the waggon off the road into a tree. Then, putting their heads down, they started blindly thundering up the road, with the waggon swaying and rocking behind them. The man shouted and pulled and thrashed them with his whip, but the horses were too mad with terror to listen to him. On they dashed until there came a turn in the road, when with a crash the waggon collided with a tree.[139] Precisely what happened we could not see. Bits of the waggon were strewn about the road, while the horses plunged on with what was left of it dangling behind them. But in what was left there was no man.

We made our way along the edge of the road to where the crash had taken place, and there among the broken wheels and splinters of the waggon we found the man lying, half on the road and half in the forest, dead. It was some time before we could make up our minds to approach him, but at last I touched him with my nose, and then we turned him over with our paws. We were still inspecting him, when we heard the sound of other men and horses approaching, and before they came in sight we slipped off into the wood. We saw the new horses shy just as the former ones had done, but whether at the smell of ourselves or of the dead man in the road we did not know. The men managed to quiet them, however, and got out of the waggon, and after standing over the dead man for a while they lifted him and took him away with them.

We loitered about until it was dark, and then tried to make our way on to where my old home had been. It could not be half a mile away, but that half-mile was beset with houses,[140] and as we drew nearer the houses became thicker, until I saw that it would be useless to go on, for where the cedar-trees used to grow, where the hill-slope was that I had tumbled down, where Blacky the squirrel and Rat-tat used to live, was now the middle of a town. At the first sign of dawn we made our way back to the............