At last Fuzzy disappeared. The children searched and searched, but they could find him nowhere. They set all his favorite dainties out on the back porch for him,—bacon, and honey, and wild gooseberries,—everything they could think of that he especially loved.
They called him, they searched the woods for some trace of his footprints in the soft ground left by the early rains, but nowhere could they find hide nor hair of him.
“Do you suppose a lion’s got him?” they worried.
“No,” laughed the Ranger. “I shouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he had gone to hibernating. You know a bear always sleeps the winter away. He can’t find anything more to eat, with the snow deep on the ground, and he can’t keep warm unless he eats, so he just creeps off into some hole and curls up into a ball, with his toes inside, and sleeps till spring.”
“Fuzzy didn’t need to. We would have fed him.”
“Yes, but you see, bears have had to hibernate for so many, many years that it has become their nature to. I guess he couldn’t help himself: he just got to feeling so sleepy that nothing else mattered.”
“But where is he hibernating? I just wish we knew where he was.”
“Oh, probably in some cave in the hillside, or under a big bowlder where he would be sheltered from the wind; or perhaps he has just crawled under some fallen tree, where the snow will bank around him and make a cave, and keep the cold wind off him, and his breath will melt an air-hole.”
Then one afternoon, when the sun had been blotted out by the big white flakes of their first real, lasting snow, the boy was pitching hay from the mow for the horses when something round and furry tumbled out and into a horse stall. It was wee Fuzzy-Wuzz, who had been pried from the warm corner he had selected for his winter’s sleep.
He blinked and yawned a few times. Then he disappeared again, and it was not till the following spring that they found him snoozing away in the far corner of the haymow.