LOST IN THE FOG
August came, with its hot sun and the salt-smelling white fog from the
ocean. Mother Brown Bear decided to take the cubs on a trip high among
the cool mountain peaks. “You know Chinook means snow-eater,” she told
her son. “We must see if the name fits. When the warm West winds come in
spring and melt the snow, the Indians call it the Chinook. And when the
first of their tribe named himself, he took a bite of snow. They even
call these big salmon that come from the sea to spawn the Chinook
salmon, because every spring they swim so far up these icy streams.”
“Snow would taste good today,” panted the little bear, “but I thought it
only came in winter.”
“Away up on the high peaks,” his mother told him, “there is snow all the
year around. But you are going to see even more exciting things than
summer snow before we have finished our trip.”
It was strange, starting out in the fog. Though the gray mist shut off
all the way before him, and Chinook could hardly see a tree trunk right
ahead, he could tell it was there by the message his wonderful little
nose gave him. He could tell even better in this moist air than he had
been able to in dry weather, and he could tell the difference between a
pine tree and a spruce tree as easily as the Ranger’s Boy could have
told, with his eyes shut, whether they were going to have onions or
cabbage for dinner.
The woods were strangely still today. The birds had little heart to sing
when, for all they could see, some enemy might be creeping up behind
them; for birds have to depend on their eyes more than their noses. As
the cubs padded along after their mother, the scent of whose warm fur
led the way, Chinook paused to sniff a delicious odor that was new to
him. Following his nose, he presently came to a swampy place where his
feet sank into the moist ground and his face was brushed by tiger
lilies. Now a lily means something very different to a bear from what it
does to a bee or a boy. It was the onionlike bulbs at their roots that
interested Mother Brown Bear’s young hopeful. It was the lily he had
smelled, and that made his mouth water. In another instant, without once
calling to tell his mother what had become of him, he started digging
them up with his claws and gobbling them down, till his furry face was
streaked with mud and his sides were rounded.
After he had eaten all the lily bulbs he could possibly hold, he began
to wonder if his mother and Snookie were waiting for him. More likely
they had not even missed him. Now his stomach, which was used to very
little besides the warm milk from which he had not yet been weaned,
began hurting dreadfully. The little bear whimpered, but he didn’t dare
make much of a noise after what his mother had told him about Cougar,
the California lion, and his fondness for having bear cub for breakfast.
On all sides Chinook could see nothing but gray fog. My, how his stomach
ached! And he was lost from the great, wise mother who always knew how
to make his troubles disappear. What if Cougar were hiding there in the
fog, ready to pounce upon him as Paddy-paws pounced on the mice? Slowly
it came to him that there was no one to come to the rescue, unless he
rescued himself, and he set his wits to work. Why, of course! Why hadn’t
he thought before that all he had to do was to follow his own trail back
to where it crossed the one his mother had left for him to follow! For a
bear, like most four-footed folk, has little scent glands in his feet,
and everywhere he goes, he leaves a trace of his own peculiar perfume on
the ground. It isn’t often strong enough for a boy to detect, but a cat,
or a dog, or a bear, or a mouse can tell it easily. So around and around
went the little lost bear, retracing every step of the way he had come
through the mystic maze that was the lily swamp, till at last he came
out on the trail where Mother Brown Bear had left her big footprints.
With a happy squeal he raced ahead. His mother was just coming back for
him; but to his hurt surprise she only gave him a sound spank with her
paw, and growled for him to come along, quick! But when he told her
about the stomach ache, she stopped and hunted around with her nose in
the fog until she had found a certain little red mushroom. “Eat that,”
she told him, “and you’ll soon feel better.”
Chinook obediently bit off the top of the toadstool, but instantly
wished he hadn’t, for it had the most puckery, peppery taste, not at all
like those he had sampled before. He didn’t want to swallow such
medicine, but she insisted. Then for a few minutes he felt worse than
ever, But as soon as he got over feeling seasick and the lily bulbs had
come up the way they had gone down, he began to feel better. But it was
a meek little bear who promised never again to sample anything his
mother had not told him to eat.
For a while the cubs raced merrily along, while Mother Brown Bear kept
up a lively clip. But as they climbed more and more steeply over the
canyon walls, their feet felt heavier and their breath came shorter.
After a while they reached an altitude where the fog did not follow, but
lay like a cloud in the canyon beneath them. Up here, above the fog
belt, the sun was shining, birds were singing, and the world was bright
with the green of fir trees and the pink and blue of wild flowers that
had a mild sweetish taste. Puffy white clouds sailed slowly across the
deep blue of the sky, and the air was so cool and bracing that the cubs
forgot their fatigue and started playing tag.
Then a terrifying thing happened. The ground, which had always been so
firm beneath their feet, began to rock with a sidewise motion that
fairly made them dizzy. One long quiver, and the earth ceased quaking,
but it was their first earthquake, and the cubs did not know what might
happen next. Their mother explained it to them.
Away down deep underground, she told them, it was not solid rock and
earth, but steam from the subterranean fires that sometimes spouted out
of the volcanic peaks. It was this steam that made the ground rock, out
there on the Pacific Coast. Once within her memory there had been a
mountain, that white-topped one they could see far ahead, that had
spouted red fire into the night, for it was a volcano, and there had
been an eruption. And even though that had happened a hundred miles
away, it had shaken the ground so hard (there had been such a big
earthquake) that the rocks had gone sliding down the mountainsides with
a noise like thunder, and in some places the earth had cracked right
open for ever so many feet.
“Will that ever happen again?” asked Snookie, her eyes round with awe.
“What has happened once may always happen again,” was all Mother Brown
Bear could tell her. “If we do have a big earthquake, we must run right
out into the open, because it may shake our den to pieces.”
Little did she dream that the day might come when the cubs would be glad
to remember her advice.