Page:A-Hunting of Deer-1906.djvu/33

Rh real bear. In point of fact, however, I was thinking all the time of a nice romantic bear, and, as I picked, was composing a story about a generous she-bear who had lost her cub, and who seized a small girl in this very wood, carried her tenderly off to a cave, and brought her up on bear&rsquo;s milk and honey. When the girl got big enough to run away, moved by her inherited instincts, she escaped, and came into the valley to her father&rsquo;s house (this part of the story was to be worked out, so that the child would know her father by some family resemblance, and have some language in which to address him), and told him where the bear lived. The father took his gun, and, guided by the unfeeling daughter, went into the woods and shot the bear, who never made any resistance, and only, when dying, turned reproachful eyes upon her murderer. The moral of the tale was to be kindness to animals.

I was in the midst of this tale, when I happened to look some rods away to the other edge of the clearing, and there was a bear! He was standing on his hind-legs, and doing just what I was doing,&mdash;picking blackberries. With one paw he bent down the bush, while with the other he clawed the berries into his mouth,&mdash;green ones and all. To say that I was astonished is inside the mark. I suddenly discovered that I didn&rsquo;t want to see a bear, after all. At about the same moment the bear saw me, stopped eating berries, and regarded me with a glad surprise. It is all very well to imagine what you would do under such circumstances. Probably you would n&rsquo;t do it: I did n&rsquo;t. The bear dropped down on his fore-feet, and came slowly towards me. Climbing a tree was of no use, with so good a climber in the rear. If I started to run, I had no doubt the bear would give chase; and