ed playing at the sound of the gun and run up close
to her, and they were watching her for further orders. The old girl
finally got her eye on them, and she looked at them solemnly for half a
minute, and it was plain as print she was beginning to have suspicions.
Then she was sure she had the thing figured out, and she fetched first
one and then the other a cuff that sent them rolling ten feet away.
When they got up bawling she was right there and gave them the darndest
spanking two innocent cubs ever got. Every time she hit one he would
go heels over head and yell blue murder, and by the time he got up she
gave him another belt, scolding like an old woman all the time. It
seemed to me I could almost hear her say, 'Play tricks on your mammy,
will ye? I'll teach ye. Get along home without your supper, ye little
scamps, and take that.' And so she went through the woods; spanking
her babies, and they a'yelling for keeps and not knowing what they were
being licked for, and I rolled around on top of the ledge, kicking my
heels in the air and just bellowing with laughter.

"I thought that was the end of the funniest time I ever had with a
bear, but it wasn't. Along about the first of March there was a warm
spell in the mountains, and I went down the South Fork to Devil's
Gulch, which heads up toward Signal Peak, to look over a timber claim
and see if it was worth taking up. It was one of those warm days that
take the snap out of a man, and I got tired and went to sleep under a
tree. When I waked a bear had me half covered up with leaves and was
piling on more. I wasn't cold, and didn't need any covering, but she
seemed to think I did, and I reckoned the best thing to do was to keep
still and let her finish the job. She seemed so serious about it that
I didn't dare take it as a joke and try any tricks on her, but I
couldn't figure out what her game was. She covered me with oak leaves,
pine-needles and dirt from head to foot, and then all was still. I
couldn't see, and I didn't dare to lift my head and shake off the
leaves.

"After a while I made up my mind to take some chances to find out if
the bear was on watch, and I wiggled my foot. Nothing happened, so I
wiggled it a little harder. Then I felt around slowly until I got hold
of my gun, and when I had that where I could handle it, I jumped up and
shook the leaves and dirt from my face. The bear was gone. I had a
sort of notion of what she was driving at, a