The woods now looked as green and peaceful as they had the afternoon before, and it did not seem possible that he could have been so frightened in the night. But he was hungry.
CHAPTER VII
THE SPOTTED FAWN
BACKING down the tree trunk, the runaway began looking about him for something to eat. It was the little bear’s first experience at fending for himself. Had he not been taken from his mother, he would have learned from her how to find the fat white grubs that hide under a fallen tree trunk. He might have learned how to dig out a hiding wood mouse, or where to look for roots and berries.
As it was, he sampled a mouthful of bark, but it was no good. He sniffed this way and that through the pine woods, wriggling his nose in the effort to find a breakfast. And he thought of the pan of warm milk that always awaited him after the morning’s milking.
The children were just sitting down to their breakfast of oatmeal when a whine and a scratching of claws sounded faintly through the kitchen door. Now they had cried themselves to sleep the night before, thinking their pet was gone.
“It’s Fuzzy-Wuzz!” they shouted, tumbling over one another to let him in. My! What a hugging he got! He wriggled and squirmed to get away. Then the Ranger brought in the foaming milk pails, and the prodigal was soon planting both fat fore paws in his feed pan.
After that they never put him on a leash, and Fuzzy never stayed away after dark,—at least not while he was such a tiny cub.
One morning the Ranger found that a mountain lion had been down to the corral. From the footprints he judged that the cows had driven the great cat away with their horns. But there was soon to be a new calf, and he decided to spend that day in hunting the lion.
The California mountain lion is a great, tawny beast as long as a man is tall, and it is fortunate that he is such a coward that he runs when he sees a human being. For he can fell a deer at one stroke of his great barbed paw.