Very carefully the old bear chose her path, and very slowly she moved. But for all her care, she had to stop every minute or two, and sometimes even turn back a few paces, for the cub was continually dropping behind. His big, inquiring ears took in all the vague, small noises of the mountainside, puzzling over them. His sharp little nose went poking in every direction, sniffing the strange new smells, till he would get bewildered, and forget which foot to put forward first. Then he would sit back and whine for his mother.
It was the cub's first adventure, this journey down the world outside his den. Hitherto he had but played about his doorway.
When the little fellow had somewhat recovered from his first bewilderment, the old bear moved more rapidly, leading him toward a swampy, grassy pocket, where she thought there might be roots to dig. The way was steep, winding down between rocks and stunted trees and tangles of thick shrubbery, with here and there a black-green spur of the fir forests thrust up tentatively from the lower slopes. Now and again it led across a naked shoulder of the mountain, revealing, far down, a landscape of dark, wide stretching, bluish woods, with desolate, glimmering lakes strung on a thread of winding river. When these vast spaces of emptiness opened suddenly upon his baby eyes, the cub whimpered and drew closer to his mother. The swimming deeps of air daunted him.
Presently, as the two continued their slow journey, the mother bear's nostrils caught a new savour. She stopped, lifted her snout, and tested the wind discriminatingly. It was a smell she had encountered once before, coming from the door of a lumber camp. Well she remembered the deliciousness of the lump of fat bacon which she had succeeded in purloining while the cook was out getting water. Her thin, red tongue licked her lips at that memory, and, without hesitation, she turned up the side trail whence came the luring scent. The cub had to stir his little legs to keep pace with her, but he felt that something interesting was in the wind, and did his best.
A turn around a thick clump of juniper, and there was the source of the savour. It looked pleasantly familiar to the old bear, that lump of fat bacon. It was stuck on the end of a pointed stick, just under a sort of slanting roof of logs, which, in a way, reminded her of the lumbermen's cabin. The cabin had done her no harm, and she inferred that the structure before her was equally harmless. Nevertheless, the man smell, not quite overpowered by the fragrance of the bacon, lurked about it; and all the works of man she viewed with suspicion. She snatched hastily at the prize, turning to jump away even as she did so.
But the bacon seemed to be fastened to the stick. She gave it an impatient pull,—and it yielded suddenly. At that same instant, while her eyes twinkled with elation, that roof of massive logs came crashing down.
It fell across her back. Weighted as it was with heavy stones, it crushed the life out of her in a second. There was a coughing gasp, cut off abruptly; and the flattened form lay still, the wide-open mouth and protruding tongue jammed down among the mosses. At the crash the cub had jumped back in terror. Then he sat up on his haunches and looked on with anxious bewilderment.
When, early the following morning, the Indian who had set the deadfall came, he found the cub near perishing with cold and fear and hunger. He knew that the little animal would be worth several bearskins, so he warmed it, wrapped it in his jacket, and took it home to his cabin. Fed and sheltered, it turned to its captor as a rescuer, and acquired a perilous faith in the friendliness of man. In fact, it speedily learned to follow the Indian about the cabin, and to fret for him in his absence.
That same autumn the Indian took the cub into Edmundston and sold him for a price that well repaid his pains; and thence, within three or four months, and by as many transfers, the little animal found his way into the possession of a travelling circus. Being good-natured and teachable, and inclined, through his first misunderstanding of the situation which had robbed him of his mother, to regard mankind as universally beneficent, he was selected to become a trick bear. In the course of his training for this honour, he learned that his trainer, at least, was not wholly beneficent, and toward him he developed a cordial bitterness, which grew with his years. But he learned his lessons, nevertheless, and became a star of the ring; and for the manager of the show, who always kept peanuts or gingerbread in pocket for him, he conceived such a warmth of regard as he had hitherto strictly reserved for the Indian.