Now it happened that Mother Bear was quite a distance back along the trail, and the Indian Trapper was not far ahead. For a time Snookie tugged and struggled to get free, while Chinook sniffed about her worriedly, his fur bristling as he detected the warning smell of steel. But though the ribbon of the breeze soon began to tell him that the Trapper was coming, he would not leave her. He could still fight.
On came the Trapper. He carried a belt axe, and when he saw the handsome brown bear cub, he thought what a fine little fur rug her coat would make for his cabin floor. Swinging his belt axe, he was about to strike Snookie over the head. But at that psychological moment a small-sized ball of fury hurled itself at his legs. It was Chinook, and he set his sharp white teeth into the Indian’s leg and clawed to such good effect that the Trapper turned his attention wholly to the bear he hadn’t caught. That saved Snookie for the moment, and in just another instant Mother Brown Bear came galloping to the scene of action with such a growl of fury that the man forgot his axe and leapt for a limb of the nearest tree. He made it just in time to draw himself out of Mother Brown Bear’s reach, though Chinook had clung to his leg till he found himself swinging in midair. Then while Snookie tugged agonizingly to get her toe free, Chinook and Mother Brown Bear kept watch on the trapper, the latter standing furiously on her hind legs to try to reach his feet, while Chinook growled awful threats.
Finally with one good jerk and a cry of anguish, Snookie was free of the trap, though she ran limping down the trail with her toe still in the steel teeth. With a final volley of threats, Mother Brown Bear and her son left the Trapper feeling about as bad as the cub felt with her bloody little foot—that would forever after leave a four-toed footprint.
“If it hadn’t been for you,” Mother Brown Bear told Chinook, “your sister would have been killed and eaten.”
“Huh!” sniffed her young hopeful, “we cubs fight, but I guess we’d stand by each other when there’s trouble.”
CHAPTER XII
IN THE RAVEN’S NEST
That winter was a mild one, and though Mother Cinnamon Bear slept most of it away in the den among the rocks, she wouldn’t let the cubs come with her. Ever since she had gone off on that trip without them, she had left them more and more to their own devices, till now she told them plainly that they must find themselves a place to hibernate. Snookie found another den just big enough for herself, and lined it with pine needles to make it soft and warm. Chinook preferred a hollow tree, from which hung great clusters of gray-green mistletoe with its wax-white berries. Several times they had crossed the trail of Cougar, the mountain lion, and he was glad to find a hole into which he himself could barely squeeze, and high enough above ground that Cougar wouldn’t be likely to notice it as he went by. There he would sleep for a while—say, several weeks, longer if it turned too cold—then he would sally forth for a few mice. But he found he hadn’t much of an appetite when he didn’t exercise.
It was not till April that the cubs learned why Mother Brown Bear had thought the old cave would be crowded.
There were two new little brown bears and a black one, and their mother wouldn’t let anyone so rough as the yearling cubs come near the helpless mites. For when the new baby brothers and sister had been born, they had been no larger than long-legged, cocker-spaniel babies and not half so well clothed. Even when they were two months old they were barely strong enough to follow their mother when she went out for mushrooms.
“Huh! They’re no good!” decided Snookie and Chinook. “We can have more fun by ourselves.”