“I don’t know whether I do or not,” for by now the cubs could see that the strange creature had perfectly naked wings that looked as thin as maple leaves, and that its little body was covered with fine fur. It was Nyc-ter-is, the bat, and except that he had no particular tail, he did look more than a little like a mouse, though his face and ears were rounder. His fore arms seemed to be fast to the first half of his wings, and there three of his fingers had grown so long that they held out the rest of the wing like the ribs of an umbrella. His thumbs, which came just halfway along the upper edge of the wing, had great hooked claws on them, and Snookie wondered what they could be for. He was altogether the queerest looking small person the cubs had ever seen, as he swooped and circled after moths and crickets and mosquitoes.
Chinook made a leap to catch him and have a closer look, but quick as was the little bear, the bat was quicker. He squeaked viciously, and showed his teeth, which grated together warningly.
“You little fiend!” laughed Chinook. “Are you really threatening to bite us?”
“I’ll certainly fight if I have to!” the eerie mite assured them in a high-pitched squeak that they understood as plain as bear talk, and off he darted to the limb of a tree, where hung his mate, head downward.
The cubs followed curiously. It looked as if Mrs. Red Bat had simply hung herself up by her thumbs, with her wings folded. “That’s one way of taking a nap,” Chinook exclaimed, “Let’s try it!”
“Oh, look!” cried Snookie, “she’s got four baby bats!” And sure enough, there were the wee mites, having their supper and hanging from their mother’s teats.
They watched for a while. Just at dusk the mother bat flew off to get her own supper, but though they had been watching closely, the cubs could not see what she had done with her babies. There seemed to be no nest, and though they climbed the tree to find out, there was not the sign of a baby bat anywhere to be found. Then when the cubs had forgotten all about it in the fun of chasing crickets, she suddenly swooped so near that they could plainly see her. What was their amazement to find that she still carried the four little bats clinging to her teats! They must have been heavy youngsters, too; but her wings were powerful, being so large for such a small body, and her devotion seemed to be equal to that of any other mammal.
That same June the Ranger and his Boy came, one day, upon a mother red bat hanging head downward, asleep, with her little ones, with her thumbs hooked in a low branch of a seedling yellow pine; but so still she hung, and so like the tree trunk was her orange tint, that even in full sunlight she might have escaped observation, had the Boy not been uncommonly accustomed to using his eyes. Gently he reached out a hand and lifted one of the baby bats from where it clung to its mother. It was too sleepy to protest. Its wee face looked as grotesque as that of a gnome the size of his thumb.
“Dad, do you suppose I could tame it?” the Boy asked the Ranger.
“It might die for need of its mother’s milk,” his father told him, “But I once tamed a half-grown bat. They make gentle pets if you treat them right, but if they consider it necessary to their safety, they can bite ferociously.