een's ears are quick, and his nose very keen. The slightest
warning from either will generally send him off to the densest cover
or the roughest hillside in the neighborhood. Silently as a black
shadow he glides away, if he has detected your approach from a
distance. But if surprised and frightened, he dashes headlong through
the brush with crash of branches, and bump of fallen logs, and volleys
of dirt and dead wood flung out behind him as he digs his toes into
the hillside in his frantic haste to be away.

In the first startled instant of such an encounter, one thinks there
must be twenty bears scrambling up the hill. And if you should
perchance get a glimpse of the game, you will be conscious chiefly of
a funny little pair of wrinkled black feet, turned up at you so
rapidly that they actually seem to twinkle through a cloud of flying
loose stuff.

That was the way in which I first met Mooween. He was feeding
peaceably on blueberries, just stuffing himself with the ripe fruit
that tinged with blue a burned hillside, when I came round the turn of
a deer path. There he was, the mighty, ferocious beast--and my only
weapon a trout-rod!

We discovered each other at the same instant. Words can hardly measure
the mutual consternation. I felt scared; and in a moment it flashed
upon me that he looked so. This last observation was like a breath of
inspiration. It led me to make a demonstration before he should regain
his wits. I jumped forward with a flourish, and threw my hat at him.--

_Boo!_ said I.

_Hoof, woof!_ said Mooween. And away he went up the hill in a
desperate scramble, with loose stones rattling, and the bottoms of his
feet showing constantly through the volley of dirt and chips flung out
behind him.

That killed the fierce imagination bear of childhood days deader than
any bullet could have done, and convinced me that Mooween is at heart
a timid creature. Still, this was a young bear, as was also one other
upon whom I tried the same experiment, with the same result. Had he
been older and bigger, it might have been different. In that case I
have found that a good rule is to go your own way unobtrusively,
leaving Mooween to his devices. All animals, whether wild or domestic,
respect a man who neither fears nor disturbs them.

Mooween's eyes are his weak point. They are close together, and seem
to focus on the ground a few feet in front of his nose. At twenty
yards to leeward he can never tell you from a s