CHAPTER XXXII
WAPITI
THE little bear felt more and more strongly the call to go exploring. So many things interested him, and he was so apt to find something new and delicious to eat. Besides, he felt it would soon be time to hibernate again, and now that he was getting so large, he wanted a home of his own,—some rocky den where he could be entirely by himself when he felt like it.
During the spring and summer the mule deer, (Dapple’s tribe,) had been the largest he had seen. But now that the larches had turned old gold, he sometimes met a herd of wapiti, or American elk, who had summered high in the mountains, in the stunted forests of timber line where they could browse on the foliage of the very tree tops and the lush grass of the high alpine meadows.
At the approach of winter they came down to seek the shelter of the valleys.
Every herd had its patriarch, a huge old bull wapiti, whose wide branching antlers would suddenly appear on the sky-line while he scanned the slopes. Then he would give the signal to the herd of cow wapiti and their calves who were under his protection, to follow to the feeding-grounds he had selected.
Fuzzy was afraid to come too near, for he had disliked horns and antlers ever since his experience with the range cow the year before. But his curiosity often drew him to watch these strange creatures from the safe shelter of some clump of brush.
After the first snow-fall, the wapiti would paw the ground bare with their fore hoofs till they could get at the mosses underneath. At this time the herd was joined by several others, and at night they always slept in a circle, the bulls on the outside, the cows next, and their calves in the very middle. Fuzzy wondered and wondered why they did it, till one night, when he had elected to sleep away from home.
It was starlight in the open spaces, shadowy under the trees, when he was awakened by a peculiar shiver that ran along his spine and made the fur on the back of his neck prickle. This, he knew, meant danger, though at first he could not see what it was that menaced him. Then, suddenly, he noticed a slinking, almost soundless movement along the limb of a tree between him and the wapiti on the creek bank.
Slowly, slowly the giant cat, a mere moving shadow in his tawny coat against the shadows that didn’t move, leapt to the ground and began edging, inch by inch, toward the sleeping herd. But was it sleeping? Fuzzy thought he saw the gleam of several pairs of eyes against their moveless bulk.
The cat was edging around them watching for some point where he might approach them from behind. But on every side he was faced by a barricade of pronged antlers that could have pierced him through. Finally as he came too near, the bulls arose and stood waiting—just waiting for him to come closer. But at that the lion turnedand leapt into a tree, and though Fuzzy watched till he could no longer keep his eyes open, he saw no movement in that tree, nor was the lion in the tree when morning came. Nor was the herd reduced by the loss of so much as one calf.