My, how furiously she squeaked! How she ground her teeth and struggled to turn her head and get a nip at him! But he held her tight, careful neither to hurt the valiant little mother nor to get hurt himself, while they examined her funny, big-eared, almost human face. Then they let her go, and she disappeared into the dusk.
Fuzzy was disgusted to think they had not given her to him.
CHAPTER XXX
PIKA OF THE PEAKS
ALL that summer Fuzzy wandered, wandered everywhere in search of adventure. There was hardly a spot within miles of the Ranger’s cabin that he had not explored. For he was looking for a range that he could call his own. Sometimes he found an inviting bit of country, but some other bear had already made his home on it.
One mellow day that autumn he climbed to the very tree line. Coming out on a wind-swept height where the only trees were the twisted junipers whose branches clung to the ledge, he was just about to drink at a trickle of water that welled out of a crack in the rocks when he heard the queerest sound.
It sounded like a giant cricket, “cheep, cheep, cheep,” high-pitched and plaintive. He looked about to see where it came from, for a cricket would make fine eating.
First the sound seemed to come from behind him, then from the side; then it sounded for all the world as if it must be in the rocks around on the other side. Fuzzy was mystified.
Like a gray shadow, something glided to the top of a stone not far away. It looked like a small rabbit, except that it had big, round ears rimmed with white. It was a pika.
The little bear had never seen a pika. He knew nothing of its ways. That is why he made a dash for this one. Had he known, he might have saved himself a lot of trouble. For no sooner had he moved than the little creature had disappeared from the stone. What had become of it he could not imagine.