That fall when Snookie and Chinook went camping, they first made their way back to Lookout Peak, for a few days of coasting and chasing pack-rats and snowshoe rabbits, then they took a ridge trail and journeyed clear over into a mountain valley where grazed a herd of elk.

These wapiti (American cousins of the European stag) were the largest deer the cubs had ever seen, and one of them had the most ferocious great wide antlers.

I’d hate to get that bull after me, said Snookie.

Well, you can tell his head end from a long way off, observed Chinook.

By the antlers?

You can tell, when he’s too far away to see his horns.

How?

By his tail end. Don’t you see that big light-colored patch? referring to the rump spots they wore.

That’s right, reflected Snookie. Look at them trailing up through the woods. For as the wind shifted and carried the herd the scent of the two bears, the wapiti had taken alarm.

I expect they can follow each other from a long way off, reasoned Snookie, their tail ends show up so plainly. Her mother had taught her to look for the reason in everything.

There’s always a reason, her brother agreed. Whoof! There’s Cougar! Far away across the meadow they could see the giant cat creeping sinuously like a gray-brown shadow against the dark green of the spruce woods. Cougar had craftily come up with the wind in his nostrils, and he could smell the elk when they could not get his scent.

He’ll never dare attack them, thought Snookie, who had been chased and wounded by a mule deer she had come too near at the rutting season.

He won’t dare come near the bull, said Chinook. But I’ll bet he’d like to catch a young cow. But though the two cubs waited, interested, till after dark, Cougar still crouched in the forest fringe. As night had fallen, nothing but the light rump patches showed where the herd was gathering to go to sleep. The cubs were mystified when, every now and then, one of these light patches would completely disappear, when in the dusk they could see no more than if the great animals had been swallowed by the earth. Then as suddenly, there they would be again, I know, Chinook reasoned it out. It must be when they turn around facing this way that we can’t see the rump spots.

If they hadn’t still been a little afraid of Cougar, yearling cubs that they were, they would have crept nearer to see what was going on over there where, for aught they knew, the lion still crouched ready for a spring. After awhile they gave it up. As an actual fact, Cougar too had given it up, as the herd picked the very centre of the meadow in which to sleep, and the antlered bull still kept watch over his harem.

That night, after the stars came out, the cubs made their way to the head of a river they had been following, and against the quaking aspen that grew in the moist ground, they stretched as high as they could reach, and clawed the bark to show how tall they were. Chinook was slightly larger than his sister, though she fought so well that now she could always hold her own in a scrap. Soon, he decided, he wouldn’t have her tagging him everywhere he went. She was always so much more cautious, so much less ready to take a chance. She took life too seriously. By another year or so he’d be staking out his own range, holding it against all comers, and perhaps finding a mate. He certainly was getting to be a big bear. He wasn’t even sure if he were really afraid of Cougar any more. Still, he’d be happier if only the great cat would go away. When he thought of his long winter sleeps, he didn’t like the idea of having such a neighbor to come up on him when he wasn’t looking. Cougar was so quick and agile!

Here in the boggy ground about the spring they caught a frog apiece, but they were not really hungry, for all day they had been stuffing great pawfuls of thimbleberries, elderberries, blackberries, dogwood seed and even spiny wild gooseberries, to say nothing of several kinds of nuts and roots, into their mouths. They had also had good luck with their mousing. Their sides were getting fatter and fatter. They would be well prepared for the winter cold.

After a brief nap, they started on to another mountainside to see what that was like. In these clear altitudes the stars were so many more than they had been in the moist lower slopes, and so much more brilliant, that they had no trouble whatever in finding their way. Down through the head of a canyon, then up again they climbed, till by dawn they were once more high above timberline. Where broken slide-rock led to the snowbanks of the peaks, they began hearing a curious little noise halfway between a bark and a bleat. It was like no sound the cubs had ever heard before, and it was the hardest thing in the world to tell where it came from. Now the nasal Eh! Eh! seemed to sound from under their very feet, and they would begin digging gleefully. In another minute it would sound from away off to the right or the left, or at any rate it seemed to (the ruse was a bit of ventriloquism). To the cubs it was most mysterious.

When at last yellow dawn had streamed warmingly from peak to distant peak, Chinook saw a small brown ball of fur the size of a half-grown cottontail dart from the rock right before his eyes. As he had looked off over the peaks, he must have glanced straight at the creature. But it was hidden in the rock-slide before Chinook could get over his surprise. In a few minutes it appeared on a rock higher up, but went back into some tunnel before the cubs could get into action. Its ears were too round for those of a bunny, though, and it had seemed to have no tail at all. For it was a pika, a little chief hare, who makes hay for its winter stores and lives alone on the highest peaks, buried under feet of snow the better half of the year. It would make tender eating, if only the cubs could catch it.

Thereafter they spent several hours digging among the rocks, but always, just as they thought they surely had it cornered, the pika would squeak from some place else. Were there several pikas, or was it only one? They did not know, but when they got too hungry, they gave it up to hunt for something surer.