Short Stories
29 Charles G.D. Roberts (1860–1943)
Biography
Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts was born in New Brunswick in 1860. A prolific poet and prose writer, he was one of the first Canadian authors to gain an international audience. He, his cousin Bliss Carman (1861–1929), Archibald Lampman (1861–1899) and Duncan Campbell Scott (1862–1947), are known as the Confederation Poets. He earned his B.A. and M.A. from the University of New Brunswick, and in 1880, he married Mary Fenety. The couple had five children.
After moving to New York City, he continued to publish animal stories, and according to critic W.J. Keith, he is remembered for helping to establish “the one native Canadian art-form” in his animal stories. (Canadian Encyclopedia, online ed., February 10, 2008). During the First World War, he served in the British Army, attaining the rank of captain, and later transferred to the Canadian Army. After the war he sojourned in North Africa and Europe until 1925. In that year, he returned to Canada and resumed his poetry writing. He died in 1943 shortly after his second marriage at the age of 83.
The Truce
Too early, while yet the snow was thick and the food scarce, the big black bear had roused himself from his long winter sleep and forsaken his snug den under the roots of the pine tree. The thawing spring world he found an empty place—no rabbits to be captured, no roots to be dug from wet meadows; and his appetite was sorely vexing him. He would have crept back into his hole for another nap; but the air was too stimulatingly warm, too full of promise of life, to suffer him to resume the old, comfortable drowsiness. Moreover, having gone to bed thin the previous December, he had waked up hungry; and hunger is a restless bedfellow. In three days he had had but one meal—a big trout, clawed out half-dead from a rocky eddy below the Falls; and now, as he sniffed the soft, wet air with fiercely eager nostrils, he forgot his customary tolerance of mood and was ready to do battle with anything that walked the wilderness.
It was a little past noon, and the shadows of the tree-tops fell blue on the rapidly shrinking snow. The air was full of faint, trickling noises, and thin tinklings where the snow veiled the slopes of little rocky hollows. Under the snow and under the rotting patches of ice, innumerable small streams were everywhere hurrying to swell the still ice-fettered flood of the river, the Big Fork, whose roomy valley lay about a half-mile eastward through the woods. Every now and then, when a soft gust drew up from the south, it bore with it a heavy roar, a noise as of muffled and tremendous trampling—the voice of the Big Fork Falls thundering out from under their decaying lid of ice. The falls were the only thing which the black bear really feared. Often as he had visited them, to catch wounded fish in the black eddies at their foot, he could never look at their terrific plunge without a certain awed dilation of his eyes, a certain shrin