One night, when the boy was crying, his father said: “I [[223]]will take him off the board and let him sleep on the mat.”
“We might roll over and kill him,” said the mother.
“No,” said the father, “I will take care of him.” And he took the baby off the board and put it on the mat with its face up against his own face. In the night he woke up and looked at the baby. It was a little bear. The father was frightened. He thought: “Maybe some time my wife or child will kill me, and eat me.” He wondered if his son would be a bear when he was grown up. He was sorry that the child was like its mother.
The mother bear knew what he was thinking about; she turned over, and said: “Uh! uh!” in her sleep. The next morning she asked: “What did you think about in the night?”
“I thought how nice our boy looked when he was a bear. In the daytime he is like both of us, but in the night he is like you.”
The child grew fast. Soon he was walking around. One day the woman asked: “Why don’t you go and see your father and mother?”
“How can I? The boy is too little to go with me.”
“He won’t cry,” said the woman. “When you are half-way he will forget me.”
“If we go to-day, will you go with us?” asked the man.
“I will go to-morrow. I am going to look over my beads to-day,” said the woman. “You can go to-day, but when evening comes don’t let anybody touch our boy, and don’t let him play with the children. At two different times he will turn to a bear,—in his sleep, and toward night, when he plays. There is a Tusasás in that place. In the evening he may play with the child and tease him. If he should, the boy would turn to a bear; then somebody might kill him.”