Away down along the river bank a moving gray-brown shadow stirred the salmon-berry bushes and made a faint lapping sound as it drank at a pool. As the night wind blew to their inquiring nostrils, it telegraphed that here was a huge foe. It told Mother Brown Bear distinctly that down there, fishing, was Cougar, the California mountain lion, most dreaded of all her enemies. She might have stood him off in single combat, had he ever been so rash as to attack a grown bear, but here were the cubs, so little and helpless! The only reason Cougar would ever have for coming near would be if he wanted bear cub for breakfast. Many moons ago, while exploring a distant mountain range, she had seen him lying in wait for rabbits, and when she located her den in the gulch, she had supposed that he still lived many miles from the spot. But here he was, as she could see by peering from behind a boulder, crouched on the shelving bank of the river with one paw dangling, barbed and ready to spear a fish. Perhaps it had been a poor rabbit year and he had moved into her territory. That would never do! From now on, she must keep close watch of the cubs. Perhaps he need never learn that she had these furry children to protect. If they went quietly now downstream, with the wind blowing from him to them, they might cross the river lower down. Then if he should cross their trail, he would lose their scent at the point where they entered the water. But once let the giant cat learn of the den by the cascades, and he would be watching it, like a cat at a mouse hole, for the first moment when she had to leave her children unprotected.
Now a bear, for all his weight, can pad along as softly as any other mouser when he wants to, and this time, at least, the little family got safely home without discovery. But when the great, tawny-brown cat had caught his supper and eaten it, he decided to see what might be farther downstream, and thus he happened upon the bear-scented footprints that the three had left behind them.
“Ah, ha!” sniffed Cougar, who was longer than a man is tall. “Juicy, tender young bear cubs! Just wait till I can catch one! What a feast it will be!” and he licked his whiskered lips in pleased anticipation.
But when he came to the point where the bears had crossed the river, he lost their trail, and though he sniffed about for a long time, he could not find what had become of them. Cats hate getting wet, and he wouldn’t have swum the river except in a real emergency.
Now it happened that the Ranger was after that very mountain lion, for Cougar had been killing elk and deer, and these were Uncle Sam’s woods, where deer are protected except for a little while each fall. But when Cougar had moved from his old den on the other side of the mountain, the Ranger had lost track of him.
One day, though, the Ranger’s Boy, on his way over the Pass with a pack-horse to the Logging Camp where they bought flour and coffee, heard something that sounded almost like a man sawing wood. It was away off up the mountainside. The Boy listened, and if his mother hadn’t expected him back by supper time, he would have climbed the slope to see who it could be. If he had done so, he wouldn’t have caught so much as a glimpse of the purring lion, who would have run at the first whiff of a human being. But if the Boy had had his father’s pocket telescope with him, he would have seen, stretched out flat on a shelving rock ledge, which his fur almost matched, the long, slender, pantherlike animal, as heavy as a grown man, with his small head nodding drowsily in the sunshine because he had been up all night exploring. And in his dreams Cougar licked his lips, for he was dreaming of nosing out the den where Mother Brown Bear had her cubs.
CHAPTER IV
THE HOME IN THE SQUIRREL’S NEST
Douglas, the squirrel, whose fur just matched the red-brown tree trunks, was as saucy as his eastern cousins, the red squirrels. He had been named after a famous explorer, just as Chinook was named for the Indians who lived in that part of Oregon.
It used to seem to the little bear as if the squirrel took delight in teasing him, while so surely as Chinook tried to slip away and hide from his mother, Douglas was sure to spy out his hiding place from some branch overhead, and chatter and scream about it for all the woods to hear. Then with a “catch-me-if-you-can” sort of challenge, he would go whisking almost under the cub’s nose, and away. Chinook would go racing after him, for he, as well as Douglas, could climb trees as easily as a cat. His sharp claws clung to the bark even better than Mother Brown Bear’s. But always the squirrel was too quick for him. Then when the little bear would give it up and back his way to the ground, Douglas would come and perch on a limb just out of reach, and hurl saucy threats at him, or race up and down and around the tree trunk, his tail jerking with his wrath. “These are my woods,” he was always asserting. “My pine cones! My mushrooms! Go away!” At which Chinook would retort: “I’ll eat you alive, if you don’t look out!”
Then Douglas would seat himself away out on some slender branch where Chinook could not have reached him, had he tried, and taking a pine cone up in his handlike paws, he would nibble it around and around, and eat the delicious kernels, while the little bear’s mouth watered for a taste, then throw the empty cone down on his head.