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Updated: May 26, 2025
Now it happened that they had found the same blueberry patch on the bank of the Little Vermilion that Mokwa, the big bear, had discovered after his strange ride the year before. And as so often happens, history repeated itself.
The weight of the bear helped to steady his queer craft, and unless it should strike another floating cake, Mokwa was in no immediate danger. Thus he drifted for miles, while the banks seemed to glide swiftly to the rear and the stream grew gradually wider.
The mist which hung like a white veil over the low ground bordering the swamp was fast dissolving in curling wisps of vapor under the ardent rays of the sun. The forest was alive with bird song; squirrels chattered to him from the trees and the rattle of the kingfisher was in his ears, but Mokwa held a steady course northward, his little eyes fixed on some unseen goal.
Though unable to reach the liquid, owing to the smallness of the pail, he could easily lick the spile which conveyed the sap from the tree, and this Mokwa did with evident relish. His tongue sought out every crevice and even greedily lapped the tree about the gash; then, growing impatient at the slowness with which the wonderful fluid appeared, he turned his attention to the pail.
Mokwa grew more and more frantic and the din was so terrific that a horrified cottontail, with eyes bulging until they seemed in danger of rolling down his nose, sat frozen in his tracks at the edge of a spruce thicket. The Hermit, on his way to inspect his sap-buckets, broke into a run. Mokwa, in his mad scramble, had paused a moment for breath.
Here he came upon evidences of a meal which the rival had made upon wake-robin roots. Satisfied before he had devoured all he had dug, some of the roots still lay scattered about, but, though Mokwa was hungry, he disdained the crumbs from the other's table. He dined, instead, upon a fat field mouse which he caught napping beside its runway.
But alas! when he attempted to withdraw his head, Mokwa found himself a prisoner. With the pressure against the tree the sap-bucket had become wedged so tightly upon his head that it refused to come off. Though the bear twisted and turned, banging the tin upon the ground and against trunks of trees, the endeavor to rid himself of this uncomfortable and unwelcome headdress was in vain.
Mokwa feasted greedily, at first stripping the branches of fruit and leaves alike; but at length, the keen edge of his appetite dulled, he sought only the finest berries, crushing many and ruthlessly tearing down whole bushes in his greed to get a branch of especially choice fruit.
The long summer days drifted by and autumn was not far away. Mokwa grew restless; both his food and surroundings palled upon him. At length, following a vague though persistent inner impulse, he turned his face northward toward the hills which had been his birthplace and from which he had been so strangely carried.
On the day following his harrowing experience in the sugar-maple grove Mokwa was a much chastened bear, but the incident soon faded from his memory and he once more trod the forest trails as if they had been presented to him for his sole use by Dame Nature herself.
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