Page:The Way of the Wild (1923).pdf/76

 lovable fellow and soon learns to like his boy master after a fashion.

When I was a small boy, we captured a couple of coon cubs and kept them as long as possible. Their pranks and the mischief that they got into made our place very lively most of the time. We caught them in May while mending fences. A small fox hound that always followed wherever I went on the farm treed something in an old birch stub and the hired man and I went to investigate. As the stub seemed rather rotten, we both put our shoulders against it and to our great surprise it went over. This surprised a family of raccoons as well. The two old raccoons fled with a great snarling as did the cubs. The hound caught one of the cubs and killed it, while the hired man and myself each caught a cub alive. The rest of the family escaped, but where they went I never knew, for they disappeared as though the earth had opened and swallowed them, but I presume they were just hiding near by in a tree.

The two cubs that we captured were very