“How much better,” pointed out Mother Brown Bear, “not to have scrapped over one miserable mouse. Now they’re both hurt. And there are a million mice left to catch.”
Paddy-paws ran away into the shadows, perhaps to massage, with moistened paw, the stinging scratch on his ear.
“He’s feeling real scrappy tonight,” laughed Chinook. “But he sure is ‘some mouser.’”
CHAPTER VII
LOST IN THE FOG
August came, with its hot sun and the salt-smelling white fog from the ocean. Mother Brown Bear decided to take the cubs on a trip high among the cool mountain peaks. “You know Chinook means snow-eater,” she told her son. “We must see if the name fits. When the warm West winds come in spring and melt the snow, the Indians call it the Chinook. And when the first of their tribe named himself, he took a bite of snow. They even call these big salmon that come from the sea to spawn the Chinook salmon, because every spring they swim so far up these icy streams.”
“Snow would taste good today,” panted the little bear, “but I thought it only came in winter.”
“Away up on the high peaks,” his mother told him, “there is snow all the year around. But you are going to see even more exciting things than summer snow before we have finished our trip.”
It was strange, starting out in the fog. Though the gray mist shut off all the way before him, and Chinook could hardly see a tree trunk right ahead, he could tell it was there by the message his wonderful little nose gave him. He could tell even better in this moist air than he had been able to in dry weather, and he could tell the difference between a pine tree and a spruce tree as easily as the Ranger’s Boy could have told, with his eyes shut, whether they were going to have onions or cabbage for dinner.
The woods were strangely still today. The birds had little heart to sing when, for all they could see, some enemy might be creeping up behind them; for birds have to depend on their eyes more than their noses. As the cubs padded along after their mother, the scent of whose warm fur led the way, Chinook paused to sniff a delicious odor that was new to him. Following his nose, he presently came to a swampy place where his feet sank into the moist ground and his face was brushed by tiger lilies. Now a lily means something very different to a bear from what it does to a bee or a boy. It was the onionlike bulbs at their roots that interested Mother Brown Bear’s young hopeful. It was the lily he had smelled, and that made his mouth water. In another instant, without once calling to tell his mother what had become of him, he started digging them up with his claws and gobbling them down, till his furry face was streaked with mud and his sides were rounded.
After he had eaten all the lily bulbs he could possibly hold, he began to wonder if his mother and Snookie were waiting for him. More likely they had not even missed him. Now his stomach, which was used to very little besides the warm milk from which he had not yet been weaned, began hurting dreadfully. The little bear whimpered, but he didn’t dare make much of a noise after what his mother had told him about Cougar, the California lion, and his fondness for having bear cub for breakfast. On all sides Chinook could see nothing but gray fog. My, how his stomach ached! And he was lost from the great, wise mother who always knew how to make his troubles disappear. What if Cougar were hiding there in the fog, ready to pounce upon him as Paddy-paws pounced on the mice? Slowly it came to him that there was no one to come to the rescue, unless he rescued himself, and he set his wits to work. Why, of course! Why hadn’t he thought before that all he had to do was to follow his own trail back to where it crossed the one his mother had left for him to follow! For a bear, like most four-footed folk, has little scent glands in his feet, and everywhere he goes, he leaves a trace of his own peculiar perfume on the ground. It isn’t often strong enough for a boy to detect, but a cat, or a dog, or a bear, or a mouse can tell it easily. So around and around went the little lost bear, retracing every step of the way he had come through the mystic maze that was the lily swamp, till at last he came out on the trail where Mother Brown Bear had left her big footprints. With a happy squeal he raced ahead. His mother was just coming back for him; but to his hurt surprise she only gave him a sound spank with her paw, and growled for him to come along, quick! But when he told her about the stomach ache, she stopped and hunted around with her nose in the fog until she had found a certain little red mushroom. “Eat that,” she told him, “and you’ll soon feel better.”