CHAPTER VII
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 totheir 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. Forhe 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 whereneither 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 wouldwillingly 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.
The giant cat was crouched along the limb of a fir tree.
The giant cat was crouched along the limb of a fir tree.