I was not hurt beyond a few flesh wounds, which Wooffa licked for me before we slept; and it was with a curious sense of satisfaction and completeness, as if the chief work of my life were now well done, that I lay down in the old lair which had so many associations for me, with my wife and well-grown children by me, and rested through the heat of the following day.

[CHAPTER XIII]
THE TRAP

The old neighbourhood was no place for us to stay in, however satisfactory our brief visit to it had been. It was man’s country now, and there were no other bears in the vicinity. My enemy of the night before, being old and cunning and solitary, had managed to live there unscathed year after year, after the other bears had all gone away or been killed; but for us, a family of four, of whom two were inexperienced youngsters not yet two years old, it was different. Many times during the day men passed not far from us, and the distant sounds of their voices and the chopping of axes was in our ears all day. So we remained under cover till well into the night, when man’s eyes are useless, and then we started out silently, and, as our custom was when moving through dangerous country, in single file, with the cubs between Wooffa and myself.

The end of that summer was very hot, and partly for the coolness, and partly, also, to get as far away from man as possible, we went northward and up into higher ranges of the mountains than we usually cared to visit.

As we climbed upwards, the trees grew smaller and further apart, until, just below the extreme top, they ceased altogether. Above the tree-line rose what looked from below like the ordinary rounded summit of a mountain with rocky sides, and even at this time of year small patches of snow still lingered in the sheltered spots. As we came out on the top, however, instead of the rounded summit which we expected, the ground broke suddenly away before our feet, and below us, blue and still and circular, lay a lake. The mountain was no more than a shell or a gigantic cup, filled to within fifty feet of its rocky brim with the clearest of water. I had seen a similar lake in the year when I roamed alone before I met Wooffa, and my father had told me long ago that there were many of these mountain lakes round us, though, of course, we could not see them from below.

Here on these lonely summits live the mountain-sheep and mountain-goat. Round the edge of the water their feet had beaten a regular trail, and in the rough crevices of the bark of the last of the trees, tufts of white wool were sticking where the goats had rubbed themselves against the trunks. As we stood on the edge of the thin lip of rock, a sheep with its great curved horns that had been drinking at the lake scrambled in alarm up the further side, and, standing for a minute against the skyline opposite, disappeared over the edge; and though we lived there for nearly two months, and smelled them often and heard them every night, we never saw one again except clear across the whole width of the lake. They were probably right in keeping away from us, because a young mountain sheep—well, though I had never tasted one, it somehow suggested thoughts of pig.

At one side there was a break in the rocky wall or rim of the cup, and through this the water trickled, to swell gradually, as it went on down the mountain, into a stream, which, joining with other streams, somewhere became, no doubt, a river. At the point where the water flowed out of the lake, the hillside was strewn with huge boulders and fragments of rock down to below the timber-line, and here among these rocks, where the brush grew over them and the stream tumbled by, was an ideal place to spend the remaining hot weather; and here we stayed. Man, we were sure, had never been here, nor was he likely to come, and we wandered carelessly and without a shadow of fear.

Before the cold weather came our family broke up. We did not quarrel; but it is in the course of nature that young bears, when they are able to take care of themselves, should go out into the world. Wahka was no longer a cub, and there is not room in one family for two full-grown he-bears. On the other hand, Wooffa and Kahwa had not of late got on well together. My wife, as is the way of women, was a little jealous of my affection for Kahwa, and—well, sometimes I am bound to say that I thought Wooffa spent rather too much time with Wahka and forgot my existence. So on all accounts it was better that we should separate. I had been driven away by my father when I was a year younger than Wahka was now, but I do not blame him; for the disappearance of Kahwa—the first Kahwa—and living away from home and nightly wanderings in the town, had made a breach between us. Now, at the separation from my son, there was no bad feeling, and one day by common consent he and Kahwa went away not to return. I had no apprehension that they would not be able to take care of themselves; and as for me, Wooffa was company enough, and we were both glad to have each other all to ourselves again.