“Don’t be too sure,” said another man. “Maybe he got out.”
“Oh dear, if I only could get out,” thought Dido, though he did not know what the men said. Later on he was to learn to know man-talk, though he could never speak it himself. Just as your dog knows what you say when you call him to come to you, or to run home, though your dog can not speak to you, except by barking, which, I suppose, is a sort of dog language.
Anyhow, Dido heard the men talking, even if he did not know what they said. They hurried up to the trap, as Dido could see, and one looked in through a crack.
“We’ve caught a bear!” cried the first man. “We really have!”
“Have we?” asked the other. “That’s good.”
“But he’s an awful little one,” said the first man.
“Never mind, he’ll grow fast enough,” the second man said. “And they are easier to train to dance when they are little.”
“What funny things those men are saying,” thought Dido. “I wonder if they are talking about me? Maybe they will let me out.”
But the men did not seem to be going to do that. They walked all around the trap, looking carefully at it.
“He can’t get out,” said the big man, for Dido could see that one man was tall, and the other short, just as Dido’s father was larger than he. “He can’t get out of the trap,” said the big man, “and we can pick it up, with him in it, and carry it away. If we had caught a bigger bear we could not do that.”