How I wish Cougar would go somewhere else to make his home! Chinook kept wishing as November’s chill came on. This looks like a hard winter. My fur has come in lots thicker than last year, and the squirrels have all laid in their winter stores earlier. I’ll bet you anything, once we get to sleep, we won’t want to wake up till spring!

And Cougar might get hungry before we woke, Snookie caught his thought. I wonder! How I wonder if he really would have the courage to attack us, now that we’re so big?

He could sneak up on us while we slept, and he’d just about have us at his mercy, her brother pointed out. I find I can’t possibly squeeze into that hole I slept in last year. But if Cougar doesn’t mind bringing down wapiti, how do we know he wouldn’t tackle yearling cub?

For all that, Snookie and Chinook soon found themselves getting so drowsy that they just couldn’t keep awake much longer, Cougar or no Cougar. One feels that way when one hibernates. They had found themselves a rock den apiece near where their mother lived, and already the snow had covered her doorway, and they wouldn’t have known she was there but for the steaming breath that melted a yellowed hole in the white.

Confound that Cougar! growled Chinook. Why doesn’t something dreadful happen to him?

He was startled out of his first delicious snooze, a few weeks later, by feeling the rocks tremble. A low sound like distant thunder, yet that was not thunder, sounded, seemingly from deep underground.

It’s another earthquake, he told himself, as a second trembling set the smaller rocks to sliding down the gulch. Instantly some advice his mother had once given him brought him wide awake with a snap. The rock den was not safe! He must make for the open!

Snookie too remembered, and the two cubs raced up the gulch to an open space where the great trees were still quivering. Is it all over? whimpered Snookie, for she still felt that dizzying sidewise motion beneath her feet.

It was not all over, for this was a big ’quake such as only comes in years. A shake heavier than before sent the rock-slide of their gulch shooting down among the fallen logs. Larger rock-slides thundered down the mountainsides. Mother Brown Bear and the little sister and brothers of that summer’s raising went racing from their dens, the youngsters too scared to know which way to turn, for it was their first earthquake. One took to a tall tree, and clung there while it swayed. One started down along the rock-slide, and when, later, they found him, he lay there half buried, cut and bleeding, and glad to pull through alive.

One of the new cubs ran out on the fallen logs, and was half buried beneath chips and branches as the whole structure shifted, then she struggled free and wisely climbed a sapling. Mother Brown Bear herself ran out into the middle of another open space.

It all took place in a good deal less time than it takes to tell it.

Then came a jerk that fairly took Chinook’s feet from under him, and with a louder subterranean growling the Big ’Quake came. Dead trees came crashing down, huge boulders pounded down the mountainsides and shook the ground anew, and a slab of canyon wall was jolted loose along a fault line and went splashing into the roiling river. Then came hail in great, driving sheets, and it was over. The cubs ducked to shelter as the icy pellets struck about their ears. There was an overhanging rock ledge that had withstood the wild confusion.

When they peeked to see what had happened, they found a great crack, as deep as a sapling pine and so wide they wouldn’t have ventured to leap across, where before had been level earth. It was an altered landscape in which they found themselves.

Then a comic sight struck their eyes. It was Cougar, whose den must have been shaken to pieces in all this tumult. The great cat was racing along with his tail tucked trembling between his legs, and his ears laid flat against the hail, while, to judge from the way his body hugged the earth, he was too terrified to stand. His nose was pointed down canyon towards the Coast, and at the rate he was speeding, Chinook thought it would be safe to count on his never coming back. As his own fright dissolved at the feel of the earth once more firm beneath his feet, Chinook’s little black eyes began to twinkle. His wish had come true.