This was the first hint to Buster that he wasn’t always going to live with his captors, and it made him very sad. When bears were sold, what became of them? Buster didn’t know, and he went to sleep very troubled. But he wasn’t sold after all, and in the next story you will hear how he was stolen.
STORY V
How Buster Was Stolen
Buster remained three whole days in the camp with the two men who had saved him from Loup the Lynx, and during that time he learned many things that his mother had never taught him. For one thing he learned manners.
One day he stuck his nose in the pot of soup on the table and began licking it up until a hand grasped him by the neck, and jerked him back. “Buster, you’ve got to learn your manners, and the time to begin is when you’re young,” said the man who held him. “Now I must punish you so you’ll never stick your nose in the soup again without remembering it.”
With that two sharp blows from a small stick landed on Buster’s nose. He yelped with pain, and tried to run away, but his captor held him. “The next time you will get three blows instead of two,” he added gravely. Buster never repeated the offence.
For another thing he learned it paid to be obliging. When the men asked him to jump over a stick or dance on his hind legs, he received a double lump of sugar if he promptly obeyed. A little extra dance, or a new kind of trick, always brought something to reward him. Buster was shrewd enough to connect the two together—the trick and the reward.
But there was one thing he hadn’t learned, and it got him in trouble again just as it did that day when he disobeyed his mother in leaving the cave when she was away. The men had to go away for a few hours, and they shut Buster up in the cabin, with the remark: