FUZZY RUNS AWAY
ONE day it came,--the chance he had been longing for!
Fuzzy-Wuzz was now a four months’ cub and much larger than when the
Ranger brought him home,--a bear as big as a house cat. He made an
armful for the children. And where at first he had been frightened in a
world where no great furry mother came to his whimper, he now began to
feel as if he could look out for himself.
One day the kitchen door was left ajar. Fuzzy had longed often to go
exploring in those green woods that stretched behind the cabin and up
the mountainside. Now he simply ran, and ran, and ran, deep into the
woods, climbing to the tops of the tallest trees and exploring here and
there and everywhere. Here he nibbled at the green, growing things he
found on the moist meadows by the spring holes, and there he took tiny
cat-naps, all curled up into a warm ball of brown fur.
Not once, all that glorious afternoon, did he think of the coyotes and
timber wolves, the lions and the lynxes that might come out of their
dens when night came, and hunt squirrels and rabbits, and perhaps stray
cubs who were young enough to make tender eating.
Towards sun-down he had an adventure. He met a band of range cattle,
and when the foremost cow saw the runaway racing about like a puppy,
she took him for a dog and made for him with her horns. It was only by
sheer luck that he escaped her lunge. For in his surprise he simply
tumbled over backwards. Being near a clump of seedling pines, he rolled
right into the thick of them, and the old cow’s horns could not reach
him.
If any one had advised him what to do when chased by a cow, he could
not have given better advice than to get in the midst of a clump of
saplings.
His natural fondness for climbing prompted his next move, and again
he did the wisest thing. He made straight for the nearest tree and
scrambled out of reach. After that the cattle wandered on and left him
in peace.
But now the yellow sun no longer gilded the fir trees, and the woods
became cool and shadowy. The wind, that all day had blown up the canyon
of the creek bed, now turned the other way and blew down into the
valley, chilled from the snow-clad mountain peaks. Fuzzy shivered with
the cold. A horned owl solemnly boomed “whoo-whoo, whoo-whoo!”
By the time the first stars peeped from the blackening sky, he began to
shiver from fright as well. For down the canyon came the long-drawn cry
of the great, tawny, man-size cat that Californians call the mountain
lion.