ma very strong. As I
threw myself up on my haunches, he came out from behind a tree, and
stood facing me only a few yards away. I was simply paralyzed with
fear--one of the two or three times in my life when I have been honestly
and thoroughly frightened. As I looked at him, wondering what would
happen next, he crouched down till he was almost flat along the ground,
and I can see him now, his whole yellow body almost hidden behind his
head, his eyes blazing, and his tail going slap, slap from side to side.
How I wished that I had a tail!

Then inch by inch he crept towards me, very slowly, putting one foot
forward and then the other. I did not know what to do, and so did what
proved to be the best thing possible: I sat quite still, and screamed
for mother as loud as I could. She must have known from my voice that
something serious was the matter, because in a second, just as the
puma's muscles were growing tense for the final spring, there was a
sudden crash of broken boughs behind me, a feeling as if a whirlwind was
going by, and my mother shot past me straight at the puma. I had no idea
that she could go so fast. The puma was up on his hind-legs to meet
her, but her impetus was so terrific that it bore him backwards, without
seeming to check her speed in the least, and away they went rolling over
and over down the hill.

But it was not much of a fight. The puma, willing enough to attack a
little cub like me, knew that he was no match for my mother, and while
they were still rolling he wrenched himself loose, and was off among the
trees like a shadow.

When mother came back to me blood was running over her face, where at
the moment of meeting, the puma had managed to give her one wicked,
tearing claw down the side of her nose. So, as soon as my father and
Kahwa joined us, we all went down to the stream, where mother bathed her
face, and kept it in the cold water for nearly the whole day.

It was probably in some measure to pay me out for this scrape, and to
give me another lesson in the unwisdom of too much independence and
inquisitiveness in a youngster, that my parents, soon after this sad
event, allowed me to get into trouble with that porcupine.

One evening my father had taken us to a place where the ground was full
of mountain lilies. It was early in the year, when the green shoots
were just beginning to appear above the earth; and wherever there was a
shoot there was a bulb down below. And a mountain lily b