Mother Brown Bear rose to her great hind feet with a growl. Then seeing that the bull still came on, she bounded to a point midway between him and her babies, and waited. The next instant he was opposite her.
With one twist of his ugly horns he could have torn her half in two, but she never hesitated, not where the safety of her babies was concerned. She would have died fighting for those helpless mites if need be.
With one sweep of her great, steel-strong fore arm she delivered a blow on the back of his neck. It felled him flat, for his spine was broken. Such is the strength of a full grown brown bear. Lucky he is a good natured animal when no one molests him.
Calling gently to her cubs to follow, she now hastened back to the den. Fuzzy stepped into view as she neared him, whining an eager greeting. But she only growled out a warning not to come near her babies. Fuzzy thought best to obey. Slowly he wandered back to the river, then on home to the Ranger’s cabin.
It had certainly been pretty fine to have his freedom, but he was always mighty glad to come back to the children and the good things they always feasted him with.
For awhile he was content to play around with the pup. One day, towards sun-down, the children heard an unusual commotion in the woods. Wiggledy was barking madly, while Fuzzy-Wuzz stood on his hind legs sniffing at something that hung from a limb.
At first it looked like a great leaf. Then the children saw that the leaf had a mouselike body covered with red-brown fur, and the face of a big-eared gnome. It was a bat, with great, leathery wings. She hung by the edge of one wing, on a hooked-nail that would have been her thumb nail, had it been her arm and outstretched fingers that formed the ribs of her wing.
There she hung, in the full glow of the setting sun. But the oddest thing about her was this.—Clinging to her were three baby bats, wee things that she was nursing as they clung to her teats.
Presently she saw a moth and flew after it, snapping her teeth in it hungrily after a short chase. And when she flew, she carried the babies clinging to her, just as they had been before. (For she had no place to leave them in safety.)
She hung herself up on another tree, and once more began watching for her prey. The children tried to catch her, for a closer look at so strange a creature, and finally succeeded in cornering her in an angle of the barn. The boy,—who knew how to handle animals,—grabbed her by the scruff of the neck where she could not reach out to bite him.