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Updated: June 13, 2025
A wink later, and his scalp would have hung there instead. In the mating season, when three or four bears often roam the woods together in fighting humor, Mooween uses a curious kind of challenge. Rising on his hind legs against a big fir or spruce, he tears the bark with his claws as high as he can reach on either side.
I found without trouble where the fawn had fallen; the moss told mutely of his struggle; and a stain or two showed where Mooween grabbed him. The rest was a plain trail of crushed moss and bent grass and stained leaves, and a tuft of soft hair here and there on the jagged ends of knots in the old windfalls.
It's a shame, Mooween, to put any gentleman in such a fix as I am in this minute, just by your blundering carelessness. Why didn't you smell me anyway, as any but a fool bear would have done, and take some other path over the mountain? Why don't you climb that spruce now and get out of the way?"
Here was a new trait, a touch of the human in this unknown, clattering suspect of the fishing streams. I resolved to watch him with keener interest. Somewhere above me, deep in the tangle of the summer wilderness, Mooween stood watching his back track, eyes, ears, and nose alert to discover what the creature was who dared frighten him out of his noonday bath.
At the point where I had stood when his deep Hoowuff! first startled me I left a big salmon, for a taste of which any bear will go far out of his way. Next morning it was gone; and so it may be that Mooween, on his next journey, found another and a pleasanter surprise awaiting him at the turn of the trail. Quoskh the Keen Eyed
Four or five times I have sat thus in my canoe while Mooween passed close by, and never suspected my presence till a chirp drew his attention. It is curious at such times, when there is no wind to bring the scent to his keen nose, to see him turn his head to one side, and wrinkle his forehead in the vain endeavor to make out the curious object there in the grass.
I regained the path silently though Mooween heeds nothing when his game is afoot and ran back to the canoe for my rifle. Ordinarily a bear is timid as a rabbit; but I had never met one so late at night before, and knew not how he would act should I take his game away. Besides, there is everything in the feeling with which one approaches an animal.
When the honey is at last exposed, and begins to disappear in great hungry mouthfuls, the bees also fall upon it, to gorge themselves with the fruit of their hard labor before Mooween shall have eaten it all. Everything eatable in the woods ministers at times to Mooween's need. Nuts and berries are favorite dishes in their season.
First, when they are traveling and Mooween is the most restless tramp in all the woods you will see that the cubs follow the mother closely and imitate her every action with ludicrous exactness, sniffing where she sniffs, jumping where she jumps, rising on their hind legs, with forearms hanging loosely and pointed noses thrust sharp up into the wind, on the instant that she rises, and then drawing silently away from the shore into the shelter of the friendly alders when some subtle warning tells the mother's nose that the coast ahead is not perfectly clear.
I had stood there a few days before, while watching to determine the air paths and lines of flight that sheldrakes use in passing up and down the lake, for birds have runways, or rather flyways, just as foxes do. Mooween evidently knew the spot; the alders showed that he was heading straight for it, to look out on the lake and see what the alarm was about.
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