to see if all was right
there, and to spend one day in the familiar place.

It was in the very middle of the day--a sultry day, when the sun was
blazing hot--that we were awakened by the sound of somebody coming
through the bushes. The wind was blowing towards us, so that long before
he came in sight we knew that it was a bear like ourselves. But what was
a bear doing abroad at high noon of such a day, and crashing through
the bushes in that headlong fashion? Something extraordinary must have
happened to him, and we soon learned that indeed something had.

Coming plunging downhill with the wind behind him, he was right on us
before he knew we were there. He was one of our cousins--a cinnamon--and
we saw at once that he was hurt, for he was going on three legs, holding
his left fore-paw off the ground. It was covered with blood and hung
limply, showing that the bone was broken. He was so nervous that at
sight of us he threw himself up on his haunches and prepared to fight;
but we all felt sorry for him, and he soon quieted down.

"Whatever has happened to you?" asked my father, while we others sat and
listened.

"Man!" replied Cinnamon, with a growl that made my blood run cold.

Man! Father had told us of man, but he had never seen him; nor had his
father or his grandfather before him. Man had never visited our part of
the mountains, as far as we knew, but stories of him we had heard in
plenty. They had been handed down in our family from generation to
generation, from the days when our ancestors lived far away from our
present abiding-place; and every year, too, the animals that left the
mountains when the snow came brought us back stories of man in the
spring. The coyotes knew him and feared him; the deer knew him and
trembled at his very name; the pumas knew him and both feared and hated
him. Everyone who knew him seemed to fear him, and we had caught the
fear from them, and feared him, too, and had blessed ourselves that he
did not come near us.

And now he was here! And poor Cinnamon's shattered leg was evidence that
his evil reputation was not unjustified.

Then Cinnamon told us his story.

He had lived, like his father and grandfather before him, some miles
away on the other side of the high range of mountains behind us; and
there he had considered himself as safe from man as we on our side had
supposed ourselves to be. But that spring when he awoke he found that
during the winter the men had come. They