THE BIG ’QUAKE
“How I wish Cougar would go somewhere else to make his home!” Chinook
kept wishing as November’s chill came on. “This looks like a hard
winter. My fur has come in lots thicker than last year, and the
squirrels have all laid in their winter stores earlier. I’ll bet you
anything, once we get to sleep, we won’t want to wake up till spring!”
“And Cougar might get hungry before we woke,” Snookie caught his
thought. “I wonder! How I wonder if he really would have the courage to
attack us, now that we’re so big?”
“He could sneak up on us while we slept, and he’d just about have us at
his mercy,” her brother pointed out. “I find I can’t possibly squeeze
into that hole I slept in last year. But if Cougar doesn’t mind bringing
down wapiti, how do we know he wouldn’t tackle yearling cub?”
For all that, Snookie and Chinook soon found themselves getting so
drowsy that they just couldn’t keep awake much longer, Cougar or no
Cougar. One feels that way when one hibernates. They had found
themselves a rock den apiece near where their mother lived, and already
the snow had covered her doorway, and they wouldn’t have known she was
there but for the steaming breath that melted a yellowed hole in the
white.
“Confound that Cougar!” growled Chinook. “Why doesn’t something dreadful
happen to him?”
He was startled out of his first delicious snooze, a few weeks later, by
feeling the rocks tremble. A low sound like distant thunder, yet that
was not thunder, sounded, seemingly from deep underground.
“It’s another earthquake,” he told himself, as a second trembling set
the smaller rocks to sliding down the gulch. Instantly some advice his
mother had once given him brought him wide awake with a snap. The rock
den was not safe! He must make for the open!
Snookie too remembered, and the two cubs raced up the gulch to an open
space where the great trees were still quivering. “Is it all over?”
whimpered Snookie, for she still felt that dizzying sidewise motion
beneath her feet.
It was not all over, for this was a big ’quake such as only comes in
years. A shake heavier than before sent the rock-slide of their gulch
shooting down among the fallen logs. Larger rock-slides thundered down
the mountainsides. Mother Brown Bear and the little sister and brothers
of that summer’s raising went racing from their dens, the youngsters too
scared to know which way to turn, for it was their first earthquake. One
took to a tall tree, and clung there while it swayed. One started down
along the rock-slide, and when, later, they found him, he lay there half
buried, cut and bleeding, and glad to pull through alive.
One of the new cubs ran out on the fallen logs, and was half buried
beneath chips and branches as the whole structure shifted, then she
struggled free and wisely climbed a sapling. Mother Brown Bear herself
ran out into the middle of another open space.
It all took place in a good deal less time than it takes to tell it.
Then came a jerk that fairly took Chinook’s feet from under him, and
with a louder subterranean growling the Big ’Quake came. Dead trees came
crashing down, huge boulders pounded down the mountainsides and shook
the ground anew, and a slab of canyon wall was jolted loose along a
fault line and went splashing into the roiling river. Then came hail in
great, driving sheets, and it was over. The cubs ducked to shelter as
the icy pellets struck about their ears. There was an overhanging rock
ledge that had withstood the wild confusion.
When they peeked to see what had happened, they found a great crack, as
deep as a sapling pine and so wide they wouldn’t have ventured to leap
across, where before had been level earth. It was an altered landscape
in which they found themselves.
Then a comic sight struck their eyes. It was Cougar, whose den must have
been shaken to pieces in all this tumult. The great cat was racing along
with his tail tucked trembling between his legs, and his ears laid flat
against the hail, while, to judge from the way his body hugged the
earth, he was too terrified to stand. His nose was pointed down canyon
towards the Coast, and at the rate he was speeding, Chinook thought it
would be safe to count on his never coming back. As his own fright
dissolved at the feel of the earth once more firm beneath his feet,
Chinook’s little black eyes began to twinkle. His wish had come true.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's Chinook, the Cinnamon Cub, by Allen Chaffee