Meantime, the cubs sat up in amazement among the tall ferns, and looking at their mother’s sad plight, howled and whined in sympathy.
Quite mad by this time with her agony and rage, not knowing what she was about, Mrs. Bear bolted, with the trap still clinging to her foot. Cutting a great, wide path in her flight through the underbrush on she ran. Up and down the mountain she tore, all night long, with the cruel trap ever biting deeper and deeper into her foot at every turn.
“Bang, bang,” went the farmer’s gun, and the cubs hearing the loud noise, terrified out of their small wits, scurried off and lost themselves in the shadows of the great woods, while their poor mother, with a scream of baffled rage and pain dropped crashing into the underbrush.
But the bear happened to be simply stunned by the shot, and so the farmer and his boys took stout ropes and tied her four feet together and slipping a stout pole between them, in this fashion they carried her down the mountain, and then chained her to a tree near the barn. For the farmer and his boys were very proud of their live bear, and proposed to exhibit their treasure to all the neighbors.
Oh, how miserable and unhappy the poor, little black bear mother was, tied fast to the tree, while boys and men poked at her and prodded her with sharp sticks, just for the sake of hearing her fierce, angry growls. Sometimes, when too hard pressed, she would even climb into the tree, to get away from her tormentors, but in vain; the chain was too short for her to get very far away from them all, so she just howled and howled.
“I shall have to put an end to that old bear; she’s too noisy,” remarked the farmer that night, as he went to bed.
The moon came up that night over Cushman Mountain, big and yellow, and afar off among the thick, dark spruces, even above the singing of the frogs, Mrs. Bear’s little round, alert ears had caught the sound of an occasional, helpless whimpering cry, which seemed to her strangely familiar. It was the two motherless little cubs crying, hunting everywhere for their mother. Slowly but surely they were tracking her and even now they were coming down the mountain slope, and very soon the mother bear, straining her little red eyes, caught sight of the two little round shambling forms of the cubs, stealing from behind the barn.
The next thing they were all rubbing noses and “woof, woofing” together happily, while their mother fondled them eagerly, cuffing them playfully about with her free paw, almost forgetting about her smarting wounds, so delighted was she to have the cubs with her once more.
But time was flying fast; already had the old hoot owl come back from his night’s wanderings, and gone to sleep in his hole in the sycamore tree. Pale yellow rays had begun to take the place of the moon which had set; dawn was on the way, and the bears realized that they must get away.
Fiercely tugging at the cruel chain Mrs. Bear began to worry it, giving mighty tugs and wrenches, while the two cubs whimpered a chorus of encouragement. Finally something gave way, and trailing a long length of chain behind her, old Mrs. Bear and the two cubs made straight across Balsam Swamp, and then scrambled and clawed their way up the side of Cushman Mountain, and not an instant too soon, for by this time the sun had come up, and day had dawned.