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It was under most peculiar circumstances that this alien returned to his native wilderness; circumstances that we shall have to consider briefly to understand why so many mishaps befell him during his first year of freedom. From the first moment that the fuzzy little bear-cubs follow their huge mother from the den into the open world, their lessons of life begin.
All these things must have happened when I was very young less than three months old because we were still living in the same place, whereas when summer came we moved away, as bears always do, and had no fixed home during the hot months. Bear-cubs are born when the mother is still in her winter den, and they are usually five or six weeks old before they come out into the world at all.
But to Kahwa and me both father and mother were very gentle and kind in those first helpless days, and I suppose they never punished us unless we deserved it. Later on my father and I had differences, as you will hear. But in that first summer our lives, uneventful, were happy. When they are small, bear-cubs rarely go about alone.
At dusk the sky became greenish and murky, merging into a vast tent of deepest blue studded with a myriad of shining golden stars. Then the eider-ducks and swans grew silent and went to roost for the night, and the soft warm air was thrilled by the whines of bear-cubs and the cries of land-rails.
A naturalist, who has reared several bear-cubs, says, "If you have an enemy, give him a bear-cub. His punishment will be adequate, no matter what his offense." But the young farmer and his wife did not think so, and as for the baby who was now learning to walk, "Bar-Bar," as he called the young bruin, was a never-ending source of delight.
When hurt, however, the cubs whimper and cry just like children, and if the little tots are badly wounded, the distress of the mother is pitiful to see, for she moans and sheds tears just as any tender-hearted human mother would. Bear-cubs are droll little mischiefs.
She placed an image of the God-Mother in the corner; she washed the floor; and her multi-coloured room smelling as before of the woods began to resemble a forest-chapel, where the forest folk pray to their gods. In the pale-greenish twilight of the illimitable night, when only horn-owls cried in the woods and bear-cubs snarled by the river, Demid went in to Marina.
In the temperate zone bears mate in the summer months and the young are born late in January, during hibernation. Bear-cubs are very small babies for such large parents, weighing much less in proportion to their dams than most other mammals. They are blind, helpless and almost hairless.
It made him furious, and sent him chirring upstream to find another place to fish, where there were no idiotic bear-cubs who did not know any better than to walk about among his fish. Here, too, my father and mother taught us to fish; but it was a long time before I managed to catch a trout for myself. It takes such a dreadful lot of sitting still.
At some Lapp tents, where we stopped to make inquiries about the ice, I was much amused by the appearance of a group of children, who strikingly resembled bear-cubs standing on their hind legs. They were coated with reindeer hide from head to foot, with only a little full-moon of tawny red face visible. We stopped at Siepe an hour to bait the deer.
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