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Updated: June 13, 2025
Something, perhaps, in the sound a heavy, though almost noiseless onward push which only one creature in the woods can possibly make something, perhaps, in a faint new odor in the moist air told me instantly that keener ears than mine had heard the cry; that Mooween the bear had left his blueberry patch, and was stalking the heedless fawn, whom he knew, by the hearing of his ears, to have become separated from his watchful mother in the darkness.
And if you should perchance get a glimpse of the game, you will be conscious chiefly of a funny little pair of wrinkled black feet, turned up at you so rapidly that they actually seem to twinkle through a cloud of flying loose stuff. That was the way in which I first met Mooween.
On your tramps and camps in the big woods you may be on the lookout for Mooween; you may be eager and even anxious to meet him; but when you double the point or push into the blueberry patch and, suddenly, there he is, blocking the path ahead, looking intently into your eyes to fathom at a glance your intentions, then, I fancy, the experience is like that of people who have the inquisitive habit of looking under their beds nightly for a burglar, and at last find him there, stowed away snugly, just where they always expected him to be.
And Mooween the bear sleeps all winter, when game is scarce, and in summer eats everything, roots and mice and berries and dead fish and meat and honey and red ants. So he is always full and happy. But my eyes are no good; they are bright, like Cheplahgan the eagle's, yet they cannot see anything unless it moves; for you have made every creature that hides just like the place he hides in.
Then Mooween, with immense caution, slides one paw under him and with a quick flip hurls him against the nearest tree, and knocks the life out of him. If he find Unk Wunk in a tree, he will sometimes climb after him and, standing as near as the upper limbs allow, will push and tug mightily to shake him off.
The alders swayed again as if struck; a huge bear lumbered out of them to the shore, with a disgruntled woof! at some twig that had switched his ear too sharply. I slid lower in the canoe till only my head and shoulders were visible. Mooween went nosing along-shore till something a dead fish or a mussel bed touched his appetite, when he stopped and began feeding, scarcely two hundred yards away.
Only the hermit-thrushes sang wild and sweet from a hundred dead spruce tops. I was drifting about, partly in the hope to meet Mooween, whose tracks were very numerous at the lower end of the lake, when I heard him walking in the shallow water. Through the glass I made him out against the shore, as he plodded along in my direction.
One went up at our shout; the other came down with such startling suddenness that the man who stood ready with his rifle, to shoot the bear, jumped for his life to get out of the way; and before he had blinked the astonishment out of his eyes Mooween was gone, leaving only a violent nodding of the ground spruces to tell what had become of him.
Here and there, on small streams, are shallow riffles, where large fish are often half out of water as they struggle up. On one of these riffles Mooween stations himself during the first bright moonlight nights of June, when the run of fish is largest on account of the higher tides at the river mouth. And Mooween knows, as well as any other fisherman, the kind of night on which to go fishing.
"No room for doubt here," I thought; "Mooween was asleep in this pool, and the kingfisher woke him up but why? and did he do it on purpose?" I remembered suddenly a record in an old notebook, which reads: "Sugarloaf Lake, 26 July. Tried to stalk a bear this noon. No luck. He was nosing alongshore and I had a perfect chance; but a kingfisher scared him."
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