CHAPTER XXIX
MOTHER BROWN BEAR AND THE BULL
FUZZY-WUZZ had grown by now to be as fine a yearling brown bear as you will find in the Sierras.
The quaking aspens along the creek were beginning to turn scarlet when he yielded to a restless feeling that often came, and started on a journey that took him back over the way the Ranger had come the year before, when Fuzzy rode on top of the burro’s pack.
When at last he came to the rapids where he had so nearly drowned, something about the place seemed familiar. As if repeating a lesson he had learned when he was very, very young, he turned and walked up the glacier-smoothed granite slope to where a giant bowlder blocked the mouth of the den.He sniffed. It was the cave in which he had been born.
It was empty now, but from the odor of warm fur he judged that it had not been empty more than a few minutes. With his nose to the ground, he started following up the trail they had left,—a trail pungent of warm fur to his understanding nose.
It led straight to a patch of wild gooseberry bushes, and from there to a flower-dotted mountain meadow where range cattle browsed. Fuzzy hesitated. He never saw a range cow now but he looked for the nearest tree. There was no tree anywhere near.
Just as he was about to turn back, he caught a glimpse of a huge furry form that he knew to be his mother.
Cautiously he approached. Would she be glad to see him, after so long, or had she given him up for drowned, and would she chase him away as she would a strange cub?
He came a little nearer,—then he stared. Waddling along flat-footedly behind her were two wee cubs, brown balls of fur astiny as he had been when the Ranger found him.
He whimpered joyously. Just then a range bull turned, caught sight of the wee cubs, and doubtless taking them for dogs, charged them with lowered horns.
Mother Brown Bear rose to her great hind feet with a growl. Then seeing that the bull still came on, she bounded to a point midway between him and her babies, and waited. The next instant he was opposite her.
With one twist of his ugly horns he could have torn her half in two, but she never hesitated, not where the safety of her babies was concerned. She would have died fighting for those helpless mites if need be.
With one sweep of her great, steel-strong fore arm she delivered a blow on the back of his neck. It felled him flat, for his spine was broken. Such is the strength of a full grown brown bear. Lucky he is a good natured animal when no one molests him.
Calling gently to her cubs to follow, she now hastened back to the den. Fuzzystepped into view as she neared him, whining an eager greeting. But she only growled out a warning not to come near her babies. Fuzzy thought best to obey. Slowly he wandered back to the river, then on home to the Ranger’s cabin.
It had certainly been pretty fine to have his freedom, but he was always mighty glad to come back to the children and the good things they always feasted him with.
For awhile he was content to play around with the pup. One day, towards sun-down, the children heard an unusual commotion in the woods. Wiggledy was barking madly, while Fuzzy-Wuzz stood on his hind legs sniffing at something that hung from a limb.
At first it looked like a great leaf. Then the children saw that the leaf had a mouselike body covered with red-brown fur, and the face of a big-eared gnome. It was a bat, with great, leathery wings. She hung by the edge of one wing, on a hooked-nail that would have been her thumb nail, had it been her arm and outstretched fingers that formed the ribs of her wing.
There she hung, in the full glow of the setting sun. But the oddest thing about her was this.—Clinging to her were three baby bats, wee things that she was nursing as they clung to her teats.
Presently she saw a moth and flew after it, snapping her teeth in it hungrily after a short chase. And when she flew, she carried the babies clinging to her, just as they had been before. (For she had no place to leave them in safety.)
She hung herself up on another tree, and once more began watching for her prey. The children tried to catch her, for a closer look at so strange a creature, and finally succeeded in cornering her in an angle of the barn. The boy,—who knew how to handle animals,—grabbed her by the scruff of the neck where she could not reach out to bite him.
My, how furiously she squeaked! How she ground her teeth and struggled to turn her head and get a nip at him! But he held her tight, careful neither to hurt the valiant little mother nor to get hurt himself, while they examined her funny, big-eared, almosthuman face. Then they let her go, and she disappeared into the dusk.
Fuzzy was disgusted to think they had not given her to him.