THE INDIAN TRAPPER
While on Lookout Peak, the cubs were shown the elk that Cougar hunted,
and once they found his huge, catlike footprints, which made Mother
Brown Bear take the cubs hustling back to safer territory without pause
for rabbit hunting.
On their return trip, she took them circling southward along a little
travelled trail, till after camping for several days through the green
gloom of a spruce wood, where tiny streams tinkled unseen among the
dense undergrowth, and wild berries, lily roots and pine nuts spiced
their diet, they came to a stand of mammoth sugar pines, with whose
equally mammoth cones the cubs played football. Here they came very near
pouncing on a prickly porcupine, for which, their mother told them, they
would have been sorry, for his barbed stiff hair would have hurt their
paws terribly.
When it rained, they found an incense cedar, beneath whose flat, ferny
yellow-green fronds they kept as dry as they would have been in their
rock den. It was all a part of their education, for the more
tree-learning they acquired, the better would they be able to take care
of themselves and their families in the years to come.
As they got down to the lower levels, not far from the seashore, Mother
Brown Bear showed them a grove of giant Redwoods (Sequoia Sempervirens),
which in that moist climate were always green. The cubs felt as small as
mice beside the Big Trees, up and down whose awesome trunks they
climbed, exploring. These trees had been seedlings when the world was
young, four thousand years ago: they were almost prehistoric monsters of
the vegetable kingdom. The cubs were disappointed to find that the cones
of these huge trees were the tiniest of any they had even seen. They
found a hole in a fallen log that would have made a den for a dozen
bears rolled into one, and they coaxed hard to be allowed to stay there;
but Mother Brown Bear, sniffing inquiringly about, found that it
belonged to another bear who must have been, like themselves, off
camping, and would not have allowed them to hunt in his territory.
Then vacation time was over, and they were safely back in their spruce
woods, with the grove of yellow pines for neighbors. And thankful they
were to see the old familiar spots, for a bear loves home, despite his
vacation rambling. The soft haze of Indian summer had turned to frosty
mornings when Douglas, the red squirrel, and all his tribe chattered
busily garnering the pine and spruce nuts for their winter larder. Mrs.
Tree Mouse had her children trained to look out for themselves, and
Paddy-paws the bobcat and Mazama the mysterious owl had reduced the
numbers of the red-backed burrow mice who ran squeaking across the open.
Mother Cinnamon Bear left the cubs more and more to their own devices.
One day Chinook discovered a strange footprint. It was not that of any
four-footed creature, nor was it that of the Ranger and his Boy. It was
that of the Indian Trapper who caught forest people for their fur. He
came every winter to set traps for bears and bobcats, foxes, skunks, and
other furry folk, and once Chinook came upon one of the bob kittens who
cried pitifully, with her paw caught fast in a steely-smelling thing
that had been hidden under the leaves and baited with a fish. And it was
the last time he ever saw that kitten! After that Chinook avoided the
neighborhood of that steel smell. But Snookie had yet to become
trap-wise. Mother Brown Bear had been off on a trip by herself, or she
could have told the cubs that the smell of steel and Indian moccasins
was a danger signal.
But one day she came back, just as the two cubs had started off on a
nutting expedition. The cold rains had set in, and they were all
beginning to feel sleepy, as bears do in winter, even when it isn’t cold
enough to make hibernating necessary. It must have been that Snookie was
thinking about how nice it would be to find some snug hollow tree and
curl up with her toes inside, and one paw over her nose, and sleep for a
week at a time. At any rate, without once noticing where she was going,
she stepped into a lynx trap. It caught her middle toe, and she gave a
yell of pain.
Now it happened that Mother Bear was quite a distance back along the
trail, and the Indian Trapper was not far ahead. For a time Snookie
tugged and struggled to get free, while Chinook sniffed about her
worriedly, his fur bristling as he detected the warning smell of steel.
But though the ribbon of the breeze soon began to tell him that the
Trapper was coming, he would not leave her. He could still fight.
On came the Trapper. He carried a belt axe, and when he saw the handsome
brown bear cub, he thought what a fine little fur rug her coat would
make for his cabin floor. Swinging his belt axe, he was about to strike
Snookie over the head. But at that psychological moment a small-sized
ball of fury hurled itself at his legs. It was Chinook, and he set his
sharp white teeth into the Indian’s leg and clawed to such good effect
that the Trapper turned his attention wholly to the bear he hadn’t
caught. That saved Snookie for the moment, and in just another instant
Mother Brown Bear came galloping to the scene of action with such a
growl of fury that the man forgot his axe and leapt for a limb of the
nearest tree. He made it just in time to draw himself out of Mother
Brown Bear’s reach, though Chinook had clung to his leg till he found
himself swinging in midair. Then while Snookie tugged agonizingly to get
her toe free, Chinook and Mother Brown Bear kept watch on the trapper,
the latter standing furiously on her hind legs to try to reach his feet,
while Chinook growled awful threats.
Finally with one good jerk and a cry of anguish, Snookie was free of the
trap, though she ran limping down the trail with her toe still in the
steel teeth. With a final volley of threats, Mother Brown Bear and her
son left the Trapper feeling about as bad as the cub felt with her
bloody little foot—that would forever after leave a four-toed footprint.
“If it hadn’t been for you,” Mother Brown Bear told Chinook, “your
sister would have been killed and eaten.”
“Huh!” sniffed her young hopeful, “we cubs fight, but I guess we’d stand
by each other when there’s trouble.”