CHAPTER V
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.