“Go easy,” advised Frank. “We stand a swell chance of killing a bear with these light shotguns. Where is it, Ned?”
The boys were all speaking in low tones, and had come to a halt in a little circle of trees. All about them was thick underbrush, from the midst of which had issued the disturbance that caused Ned to exclaim.
“There it is!” he said, grasping Frank by the arm, and pointing toward something dark. At that moment it moved, and a good-sized animal darted forward, right across the trail, in front of the boys, and, an instant later was scrambling up a tall tree as if for dear life.
“Fire!” cried Ned, suiting the action to the word. He aimed point-blank at the creature, but, when the smoke cleared away, there was no dead body to testify to his prowess as a hunter.
“Missed!” exclaimed Ned disgustedly. “And it was a fine chance to bowl over a bear cub, too.”
“Bear cub?” repeated Frank. “Take a look at what you think is a bear cub.”
Frank pointed to the tree, up which the animal had climbed. There, away out on the end of a rather thin limb, it crouched, looking down on the boys—a huddled bunch of fur.
“A raccoon!” exclaimed Bart. “You’re a fine naturalist, you are, Ned. Why didn’t you take it for a giraffe or an elephant?”
“That’s all right, you’d have made the same mistake if you had seen it first,” retorted Ned. “I’m going to have a shot at it, anyway.”
He raised his gun, but the raccoon, probably thinking now was the opportunity to show that he believed in the old maxim, to the effect that discretion is the better part of valor, made a sudden movement and vanished.