The Life Story of a Black Bear

-one cub with each of the parents; or the father goes off alone, leaving both cubs with the mother. A cub toddling off alone in its own woolly,

urting one of us. When I smell a grizzly in the neighbourhood, I confess that it seems wiser to go round the other side of the hill; but that is probably inherited superstition more than anything[10] else. My father and mother did it, and so do I. But I have known several of our cinnamon cousins in my lif

in lions, and I knew their smell well enough-and did not l

strong. As I threw myself up on my haunches, he came out from behind a tree, and stood facing me only a few yards away. I was simply paralyzed with fear-one of the two or three times in my life when I have been honestly and thoroughly frightened. As I looked at him, wo

my voice that something serious was the matter, because in a second, just as the puma's muscles were growing tense for the final spring, there was a sudden crash of broken boughs behind me, a feeling as if a whirlwind was going by, and my mother shot past me straigh

ub like me, knew that he was no match for my mother, and while they were stil

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to give her one wicked, tearing claw down the side of her nose. So, as soon as my father and Kahwa joined us, we

lesson in the unwisdom of too much independence and inquisitiveness in a youngster,

d wherever there was a shoot there was a bulb down below. And a mountain lily bulb is one of the very nicest things to eat that there is-so sweet, and juicy, and crisp! The place was some d

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nd did not look as if it ever could move again, so finally I concluded that it must be a large fungus or a strange new kind of hillock, with black and white grass growing all over it. My father and mother had stopped short when they saw it, and just sat up on their haunches and looked at it; and Kahwa did the same, snuggling up close to my mother's side. Was it an animal, or a fungus, or only a mound of earth? The way to find out was to smell it. So, without any idea of hurtin

e thing just as hard as I could. A moment later I was hopping round on three legs howling with pain, for a bu

d all day, whenever she found a particularly fat lily bulb, she gave it to me. For my part, I could only d

s old-because we were still living in the same place, whereas when summer came

r some time I imagine that the longest journey I made was when I tumbled those fifty feet downhill. Father or mother might wander away alone in the early morning or evening for a while, but for the most part we were all four at home by the ro

ray ones mostly; but living in a fir-tree close

om the ground, just safely out of reach, and there, hanging head downwards, call us every name he could think of. Squirrels have an awful[16] vocabulary, but I never knew one that could talk like Blacky. And every time he thought of something new to say he waved his tail at us in a way that w

inches too high. Then we would run round on opposite sides of the tree in the hope of cutting him off when he came down. But when we did that he never did come down, but just went up instead, till he reached a place wher

way in which a bear can catch squirrels, and that is by pretending to be dead or asleep; for squirrels are so idiotically inquisitive that sooner or later they are certain to come right up to y

han squirrels, they are much less fluffy in

down, they used to sit on the very tops of the trees, and call to each other from hill to hill-just two long whistles, 'whee-whoo, whee-whoo.' It was a sad noise, but I liked Rat-tat. He was so jauntily gay in his suit of black and white, with his [18]bright red crest, and always so immensely busy.

us, and once a lovely fat beetle grub that he had somehow overlooked came plump down under my very nose. If that was the kind of thing that he found

ng all four together, as I have said, and then we began to

light, has grown white and juicy, and almost as sure of some mushrooms or other fungi, most of which are delicious. But before you can touch them you have to look after the insects. Mushrooms will wait, but the

wandering about for more than half of the twenty-four hours, except in the very heat of summer, and he is eating most of the while that he wanders. The greater part of his food, of course, is greenstuff-lily bulbs, white camas roots, wild-onions, and young shoots and leaves. As he walks he browses

age and the roots of the water-plants, but frogs and insects of all sorts among the grass. Our favourite bathing-place was just above a wide pool made by a beaver-dam. The pool itself was deep in places, but before the river came to it, it flowed for a hundred yards and more over a level gravel bottom, so shallow that even as a cub I could walk from shore to shore without the water being above my shoulders. At the edge of the pool the same black

ng downstream and then swinging round to take his station almost exactly in the same spot as before. If you leave your paw absolutely still, he does not mind it, and may even, on his return, come and lie right up against it. If so, you strike at once. More probably he will stop a few inches or a foot away. If you have already reached as far as you can towards him, then is the time that you need all your[22] patience. Again and again he darts out to take a fly from the surface of the water or swallow something that is floated down to him by the current, and each time that he comes back he may shift his position an inch or two. At last h

way, with no more chance of catching them than of making supper off a waterfall. But father and mother used t

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antly patching and tinkering at the dam, and some always at work, except when the sun was up, one relieving another, gnawing their way with little tiny bites steadily through one of the great trees that stood by the water's edge, and always gnawing it so that when, after weeks of labour, it fell, it never failed to fall across the

feet away in the water, they would talk to us pleasantly enough; but-well, my father told me[24] that young, very young, beaver was good

ping through the middle hours of the night, but in summer more often roaming on, to come back to the

ht a thunderstorm, the delight of the smell of the moist earth and the almost overpowering scent of the pines! And when the berries were ripe-blueberries, cranberri

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