Chinook obediently bit off the top of the toadstool, but instantly wished he hadn’t, for it had the most puckery, peppery taste, not at all like those he had sampled before. He didn’t want to swallow such medicine, but she insisted. Then for a few minutes he felt worse than ever, But as soon as he got over feeling seasick and the lily bulbs had come up the way they had gone down, he began to feel better. But it was a meek little bear who promised never again to sample anything his mother had not told him to eat.
For a while the cubs raced merrily along, while Mother Brown Bear kept up a lively clip. But as they climbed more and more steeply over the canyon walls, their feet felt heavier and their breath came shorter. After a while they reached an altitude where the fog did not follow, but lay like a cloud in the canyon beneath them. Up here, above the fog belt, the sun was shining, birds were singing, and the world was bright with the green of fir trees and the pink and blue of wild flowers that had a mild sweetish taste. Puffy white clouds sailed slowly across the deep blue of the sky, and the air was so cool and bracing that the cubs forgot their fatigue and started playing tag.
Then a terrifying thing happened. The ground, which had always been so firm beneath their feet, began to rock with a sidewise motion that fairly made them dizzy. One long quiver, and the earth ceased quaking, but it was their first earthquake, and the cubs did not know what might happen next. Their mother explained it to them.
Away down deep underground, she told them, it was not solid rock and earth, but steam from the subterranean fires that sometimes spouted out of the volcanic peaks. It was this steam that made the ground rock, out there on the Pacific Coast. Once within her memory there had been a mountain, that white-topped one they could see far ahead, that had spouted red fire into the night, for it was a volcano, and there had been an eruption. And even though that had happened a hundred miles away, it had shaken the ground so hard (there had been such a big earthquake) that the rocks had gone sliding down the mountainsides with a noise like thunder, and in some places the earth had cracked right open for ever so many feet.
“Will that ever happen again?” asked Snookie, her eyes round with awe.
“What has happened once may always happen again,” was all Mother Brown Bear could tell her. “If we do have a big earthquake, we must run right out into the open, because it may shake our den to pieces.”
Little did she dream that the day might come when the cubs would be glad to remember her advice.
CHAPTER VIII
TEAM WORK
As the three bears crossed the shallow head of the river, whose course they had been following up the mountainsides, from the grass almost under their feet leapt what at first glimpse they took to be a mammoth mouse.
Of course they chased it. Soon they noticed that it ran very differently from the mice they had known. Instead of scuttling along on all fours, with its long tail streaming out behind, this one gave mammoth leaps, and its tail was just a bunch of brown fur. Then they noticed what long ears it had, and what broad hind feet. “It’s a hare,” signalled Mother Brown Bear, “a ‘snowshoe rabbit.’”