“Isn’t it a shame we couldn’t be friends, that little bear and I?”
“You could, if this were a National Park where bears are never hunted.”
CHAPTER XI
THE INDIAN TRAPPER
While on Lookout Peak, the cubs were shown the elk that Cougar hunted, and once they found his huge, catlike footprints, which made Mother Brown Bear take the cubs hustling back to safer territory without pause for rabbit hunting.
On their return trip, she took them circling southward along a little travelled trail, till after camping for several days through the green gloom of a spruce wood, where tiny streams tinkled unseen among the dense undergrowth, and wild berries, lily roots and pine nuts spiced their diet, they came to a stand of mammoth sugar pines, with whose equally mammoth cones the cubs played football. Here they came very near pouncing on a prickly porcupine, for which, their mother told them, they would have been sorry, for his barbed stiff hair would have hurt their paws terribly.
When it rained, they found an incense cedar, beneath whose flat, ferny yellow-green fronds they kept as dry as they would have been in their rock den. It was all a part of their education, for the more tree-learning they acquired, the better would they be able to take care of themselves and their families in the years to come.
As they got down to the lower levels, not far from the seashore, Mother Brown Bear showed them a grove of giant Redwoods (Sequoia Sempervirens), which in that moist climate were always green. The cubs felt as small as mice beside the Big Trees, up and down whose awesome trunks they climbed, exploring. These trees had been seedlings when the world was young, four thousand years ago: they were almost prehistoric monsters of the vegetable kingdom. The cubs were disappointed to find that the cones of these huge trees were the tiniest of any they had even seen. They found a hole in a fallen log that would have made a den for a dozen bears rolled into one, and they coaxed hard to be allowed to stay there; but Mother Brown Bear, sniffing inquiringly about, found that it belonged to another bear who must have been, like themselves, off camping, and would not have allowed them to hunt in his territory.
Then vacation time was over, and they were safely back in their spruce woods, with the grove of yellow pines for neighbors. And thankful they were to see the old familiar spots, for a bear loves home, despite his vacation rambling. The soft haze of Indian summer had turned to frosty mornings when Douglas, the red squirrel, and all his tribe chattered busily garnering the pine and spruce nuts for their winter larder. Mrs. Tree Mouse had her children trained to look out for themselves, and Paddy-paws the bobcat and Mazama the mysterious owl had reduced the numbers of the red-backed burrow mice who ran squeaking across the open. Mother Cinnamon Bear left the cubs more and more to their own devices.
One day Chinook discovered a strange footprint. It was not that of any four-footed creature, nor was it that of the Ranger and his Boy. It was that of the Indian Trapper who caught forest people for their fur. He came every winter to set traps for bears and bobcats, foxes, skunks, and other furry folk, and once Chinook came upon one of the bob kittens who cried pitifully, with her paw caught fast in a steely-smelling thing that had been hidden under the leaves and baited with a fish. And it was the last time he ever saw that kitten! After that Chinook avoided the neighborhood of that steel smell. But Snookie had yet to become trap-wise. Mother Brown Bear had been off on a trip by herself, or she could have told the cubs that the smell of steel and Indian moccasins was a danger signal.
But one day she came back, just as the two cubs had started off on a nutting expedition. The cold rains had set in, and they were all beginning to feel sleepy, as bears do in winter, even when it isn’t cold enough to make hibernating necessary. It must have been that Snookie was thinking about how nice it would be to find some snug hollow tree and curl up with her toes inside, and one paw over her nose, and sleep for a week at a time. At any rate, without once noticing where she was going, she stepped into a lynx trap. It caught her middle toe, and she gave a yell of pain.