“Yes, and down in San Luis Potosi they sell them at the market stalls to be cooked like rabbits. Look out! Is that your pocket knife that fellow’s dragging across your bunk?”
The Boy made a dash for his property. “Can you beat it!”
But up in Rat Town they were giving Chinook a merry chase.
CHAPTER X
A LIVE SNOWBALL
The day after they visited Rat Town, Mother Brown Bear led the cubs high above the surrounding mountain slopes to where a sandy meadow stretched to the foot of snow-clad Lookout Peak.
This eleven-thousand-foot sky-meadow was a riot of wild flowers. Yellow mimulas and purple pussy-paws carpeted the ground beneath their feet, while snowy slopes, blue in the cloud shadows, towered to the summit or swept in a long slope to the spruce woods lying dark green beneath them. The air was as fresh as a drink from a snow-fed river.
What amazed the cubs was that great swarms of red and black butterflies danced above them. Snookie and Chinook had a gay time trying to catch them. Where the purple and white honey-lupin set their noses wriggling, the butterflies danced in a cloud. Mother Brown Bear was amazed to see butterflies in this chill altitude, for though she had been a great traveller, she had always before found them down in the warm meadows where the bees gathered the honey that she loved. She did not know that these butterflies were migrating South for the winter. But they had not come all this way to chase butterflies.
What Mother Brown Bear liked best about the summer snow fields was that here she often found whole swarms of frozen grasshoppers. To hunt for this delicacy she now called the cubs to the foot of the nearest snowbank, and while she dug and sniffed and feasted, they lapped the strange white stuff that felt so cold. Then Snookie fell down and rolled head over heels, and to Chinook’s surprise, the half melted snow clung to her till she looked like a little white bear instead of a cinnamon cub. The next thing Mother Brown Bear knew, the cubs were climbing the steep snowbanks for the sake of coasting down. Sometimes they sat with feet straight out in front of them, but oftener they threw themselves down flat on their stomachs and did it “belly bumps.” Over and over and over they tried it, while their mother searched for grasshoppers, till she really began to worry for fear they might wear all their fur off. They never forgot the fun they had on their first snow slide.
Now Chinook little dreamed that the Ranger’s Boy who had passed them one day was right down there in the fir woods whose pointed spires he could see from an overhanging ledge. Nor did the Boy dream that the roguish little bear was also off on a camping trip.
Chinook, having found the snow harder on the northern slope and easier to slide on, had started off with a sturdy shove of his boylike hind feet and had set himself going so far and so fast that he couldn’t stop. On the warm western slope the snowbank soon came to a stop, and there Snookie was content to coast while her mother nosed about for frozen grasshoppers. But on the northern side it sloped in an unbroken expanse of hard white that glittered in the reddening sunlight, and never stopped until it had reached in a long tongue down the gulch into the fir woods.