"Well, what about it?" demanded Tom.
"Those scratches on the trunk," said Bert. "What made them?"
They looked more closely and saw two rows of scratches that had torn deeply into the bark. Each row consisted of five marks at an equal distance apart. It was as though two gigantic rakes had been drawn along the rough surface, each tooth of the rakes peeling off a long vertical strip.
The boys looked at each other in wonder. Then they peered into the surrounding woods a little uneasily.
"Some animal made those marks," said Bert at last. "And, what's more, there's only one animal that could have done it."
"And that's a grizzly bear," said Dick.
Again the boys looked at each other, and it almost seemed as though they could hear the beating of their hearts. Then Tom measured again with his eye the distance from the ground to where the scratches began.
"Sixteen feet if it's an inch," he decided. "Nonsense," he went on, with a tone of relief in his voice. "There's nothing that walks on four feet could do it. A horse even couldn't stand on his hind legs and strike with his fore hoofs the place where those scratches begin. Some of those pre-historic monsters, whose skeletons we see in the museums, might have done it, but nothing that walks the earth nowadays. You'll have to guess again, Bert."
"They might have been made by some animal in climbing," suggested Dick. "He might have slipped in coming down and torn off those strips in trying to hold on."
"But grizzlies don't climb," objected Bert.