THE SPOTTED FAWN
BACKING down the tree trunk, the runaway began looking about him for
something to eat. It was the little bear’s first experience at fending
for himself. Had he not been taken from his mother, he would have
learned from her how to find the fat white grubs that hide under a
fallen tree trunk. He might have learned how to dig out a hiding wood
mouse, or where to look for roots and berries.
As it was, he sampled a mouthful of bark, but it was no good. He
sniffed this way and that through the pine woods, wriggling his nose in
the effort to find a breakfast. And he thought of the pan of warm milk
that always awaited him after the morning’s milking.
The children were just sitting down to their breakfast of oatmeal when
a whine and a scratching of claws sounded faintly through the kitchen
door. Now they had cried themselves to sleep the night before, thinking
their pet was gone.
“It’s Fuzzy-Wuzz!” they shouted, tumbling over one another to let him
in. My! What a hugging he got! He wriggled and squirmed to get away.
Then the Ranger brought in the foaming milk pails, and the prodigal was
soon planting both fat fore paws in his feed pan.
After that they never put him on a leash, and Fuzzy never stayed away
after dark,--at least not while he was such a tiny cub.
One morning the Ranger found that a mountain lion had been down to the
corral. From the footprints he judged that the cows had driven the
great cat away with their horns. But there was soon to be a new calf,
and he decided to spend that day in hunting the lion.
The California mountain lion is a great, tawny beast as long as a man
is tall, and it is fortunate that he is such a coward that he runs when
he sees a human being. For he can fell a deer at one stroke of his
great barbed paw.
But he kills sheep and calves every chance he gets, and Uncle Sam asks
his Forest Rangers to kill every lion they find.
The Ranger took his gun and started following the footprints the giant
cat had left in the dust of the trail as it led up the mountain side.
Soon the animal had leapt aside where only a scratch of its claws on a
rock here and there told the tale.
By and by the slim, pointed hoof prints of a doe crossed the trail. The
Ranger hurried even faster now, for he did not want another deer killed.
A gentle-eyed young doe had sought hiding that morning in a leafy clump
of deer brush,--for in the evergreen forests of the Sierras there is
little of the thick under-growth that one finds among the oaks and elms
and maples of the Eastern woodlands.
This doe had a reason for selecting a good hiding-place, for that very
morning twin fawns were born to her, and she had known they must be
hidden away where neither lions nor coyotes could find the helpless
things.
The fawns had dappled coats, with milk-white spots on their soft,
rusty-colored fur; and the doe found a place where the sunlight danced
in patches on the rusty-colored earth, and the fawns would not have
been noticed had one looked at the very spot,--unless they moved.
Such innocent, soft-eyed babies as they were, these firstlings of the
rust-red doe! Like their mother, they had long ears and white tails
with black tips. Their long, slender legs were at first too fragile for
them to stand, and they lay on the soft moss as she licked their fur,
with her wild mother love in her great eyes.
Off on the mountain peak their father, a great, handsome buck with
branching antlers, was in retreat, with half-a-dozen other deer, while
their horns were in velvet, for this velvety fur that covers the new
growth of horn is tender, and the deer brush of the lower slopes would
hurt it.
But alas for the wild mother, who would willingly die fighting for her
little ones! At the very moment that she lay nuzzling them so happily,
the giant cat was crouched along the limb of a fir tree watching, with
yellow eyes blinking hungrily. The way the wind blew, no taint of the
lion reached her nostrils, and she had no warning.
The mountain lion had been unsuccessful in his last night’s hunt; he
had wandered miles in search of prey. Suddenly gathering all fours
beneath him, he had made one powerful leap at the doe. At this moment
the Ranger, hurrying along his trail, sighted the tawny form and sent a
bullet through its heart.
But so powerful had been the great cat’s leap that it did not stop even
then, but still clutching the doe, it went sliding and rolling down the
hillside till it crashed over a ledge,--and one of the fawns with them.
It was too late to save the others, but the Ranger took the remaining
fawn in his arms and carried it home to his children. Thus Dapple, the
fawn, became a fellow member of Fuzzy’s household.
[Illustration: The giant cat was crouched along the limb of a fir
tree.]