CHAPTER I

Little Timmy Whoof was a fat bear cub. He didn't look unlike an ordinary kitten, except that he was larger.

In color he was yellowish, with soft, thick fur, a broad baby head, and two small brown eyes that glinted--and sometimes squinted--like the eyes of a little farmyard piggy.

When he grew bigger he would be what people call a "cinnamon bear," which means that his fur coat would be a pretty light brown of the same hue as the spicy cinnamon powder which mothers use for flavoring the cinnamon buns that children love. And every child knows what a cinnamon candy stick is!

Funny that there should be any connection between a rough, roaming, wild bear of the woods and a candy stick, isn't it?

Probably Timmy Whoof would never taste a real sugar stick out of a glass jar in a store. But sweets are to be found in the woods, too, and when he grew older he would love honey, for the wild bees keep a candy store for him in the hollow of some big "bee-tree," as it is called, meaning a tall maple- or oak-tree, which they had packed full of delicious honey.

And when Timmy Whoof went bee hunting, to steal from the wild bees' sweet store, being a rough, ignorant bear who didn't know any better, he would just put his paw in and take his candy, meaning the wild honey, without paying for it.

And sometimes his broad, black nose, dull black like rubber, would be stung so hard and often by the angry bees when he poked that greedy nose into the deep hollow of a tree, to find out by smelling whether there was honey there, that it would swell up to twice its size.

And sometimes his funny little piggy eyes would be stung and red and swollen, too, almost closed.

But just now, when I am beginning to tell you about him, he was a great deal too young to go bee hunting or honey hunting, for he was not yet two months old.

He did not, at this time, have even a name. In fact, he never would have been called "Timmy," or any other name in particular, other than that of Mr. Cinnamon Bear which had belonged to his father before him, if he hadn't had, while still quite young, some stranger adventures than bee hunting which led to his making friends with a man.

But before I tell you of those adventures I must say something about his little twin brother and about the cave in which they were both born one mild, May day.

The twin brother was so like Timmy--who, you must remember, was not called "Timmy" yet--that the wild bees could never have told one from the other. Only their own mother could! But the twin was just a wee bit smaller and weaker than Timmy who had as much life and fun in him as half a dozen kittens.

He just loved to toddle out of the cave on his four fat, furred legs as soon as he could walk, and sprawl in the sunshine on the broad, open plain, miles wide, with a river running through it, where the cave was situated.

It was a vast and splendid playground for a little, yellowish bear cub, that plain. There were round, dark holes scattered here and there all over it where the small prairie dogs, not much larger than brown rabbits, ran to hide. Sometimes, at early morning or when the shadows of evening were falling, a lean gray wolf or the wolf's smaller brother, a greedy coyote of the plains, would come up through the bushes from the river brink and try to steal a march on the two little bear cubs if they happened to be playing out-of-doors, before the cave.

But old Madam Cinnamon Bear, their mother, had a broad nose that was very fine for smelling either wolf or coyote a long way off. She would hunch up her shaggy, cinnamon-colored back and growl! She would squint in the direction of the bushes from which an enemy might come, her little dark eyes turning in towards her dull-black nose with uneasiness, lest wolf or coyote should get near enough to pick up one of her fat cubs and run off with it.

Generally, she would hustle Timmy and his twin brother back into the darkest corner of the cave, with a warning, growling, "Whoof! Whoof! Booitt!" which Timmy soon learned from her, so that he could get off a little, growly "Whoof! Whoo-oof!" himself, and that is how, by and by, he came by his second name.

She was very good to her two fat cubs, was Madam Cinnamon Bear. She spanked them occasionally and romped with them often, in the cave and out of it. She watched over their safety night and day and left them only when she had to go berrying or bee hunting or mouse hunting to get a meal for herself.

As a rule, she was at home before dark, before the inside of the cave grew black and cold. But one evening she happened to be very late in coming, and when Timmy, the stronger of the bear cubs, heard at last a crashing among some bushes outside the cave's dim mouth, which meant that she was near, he trotted out to meet her.

Then he got a great surprise. He hardly knew whether it was his mother or not. She didn't look natural. She was standing upright on her hind legs, tall and straight, listening, listening, as if she were both surprised and frightened.

"Whoof!" said Timmy a little piteously. "Whoo-oof!" and then he made a mewing noise like a kitten--half a mew and half a baby growl--which meant: "O mother, I'm so-o hungry! So is brother! How late you are! Please give over shuffling round on your hind legs, and attend to us!"

"Boo-oo-ooit! Stop your crying!" growled his mother; and dropping to all fours again, meaning to her four feet, she gave him a smart little slap with one of those feet, or furry paws, which would have been as soft as they were shaggy had it not been for the five brown claws, curved like hooks, which grew on each.

They could scratch and tear dreadfully, those claws, but they didn't scratch Timmy, although his mother seemed, somehow, put out and crosser with him than she had ever been before.

"Boo-ooitt!" she growled again. "Don't you know enough to keep quiet? I heard a dog bark."

With that she stood upright again for a moment, straight and still as a brown rock, and gazed off over the plain where the night shadows were like a dark, frowning wall, so that little Timmy Bear-cub could not see very far.

But his mother could. While he blinked and whined at the darkness, mewing, kitten-like, because he didn't like being even gently spanked, she was smelling and looking and listening with her brown ears pricked, her dull-black, rubber-like nose spread and snorting. For what do you think she saw? Stars!

Stars overhead, plenty of them, hanging their tiny lamps in the night sky! But they didn't bother her.

No; the stars which made her stand upright and growl, looking tall and stretched like a child on stilts--those stars were down nearer to the ground, meaning the dark plain.

They were quite a long way off, a mile, at least. But they were so red and so bright that they could be seen for a long distance over the flat plain.

There was a ring of them, a regular ring upon a hillside, surrounding a larger, brighter red light in the center, like "a ring around the rosy," such as little children play when they join hands and dance around a rose-bush.

These stars, or lights on a mountainside, didn't dance. They kept perfectly still, too still for Madam Bear's taste. She would have understood them better if they were moving.

"Riddle me, riddle me, ree, What can these red lights be?"

was what she was saying to herself in bear talk while she stood growling on her hind legs with Timmy whining beside her.

But although the ring of red stars down near the flat earth was a red puzzle, the sound which came from some spot near them was not new to Madam Cinnamon Bear. Very faint and very far away, it still could be recognized as a dog's bark. And she had heard dogs bark before.

She had been chased by them, too. They had led her the funniest kind of a dance by capering round her and barking madly at her heels, just as if they were saying to her, "Dance, Bear Woman, dance! Wouf! Wouf!"

But O dear me! it had not been funny for her. She was a great deal bigger and ever so much stronger than either of the two dogs which led her this sorry dance out upon the flat plain. She could have hugged both of them tightly in her brown arms, meaning her fore legs, when she stood up straight, and crushed all the bark out of them forever, if, only, she could have caught them.

But they were sheep-dogs, those saucy, barking bow-wows, which means that they helped men to take care of a great flock of woolly sheep which fed upon the hillsides; and by constantly running round that baaing flock, driving them together, they had become so quick upon their feet that no bear could catch them.

So they just played nip and tag with her all over the plain, while she stood clumsily on her hind legs or, dropping to four feet again, galloped wildly this way and that, trying to get her paws on them, and couldn't.

I declare it was a case of

"Dickery, dickery, dare, The bear flew up in the air; The dog in brown soon brought her down, So dickery, dickery, dare!"

You remember that old nursery rhyme, don't you, only it is about a pig and a man, not dogs and a bear?

So it was no wonder that when, on coming home late this evening, Mother Cinnamon Bear heard a dog bark away off on the other side of the plain near the hill where the strange ring of lights was, she stood on her hind legs outside the cave, growling strangely!

No wonder that she slapped Timmy and asked him in snarly bear talk whether he didn't know enough to keep quiet if dogs, saucy dogs, were anywhere within a mile of one!

She didn't want to be put through a hop-skip-and-jump dance by dogs again, out on the plain, although she was, later, as you will hear. And funnier things than that happened to her, too!

But now she kept rearing up and dropping down outside her cave home, with Timmy making a noise like a fat, crying kitten and rubbing himself against her.

"Boo-ooitt! Whoo-oof!" she growled softly over and over until she seemed to be imitating a dog's voice barking at that distant hillside where the ring of red stars was, saying,

"Booitt! Ow-ow! I'm very scared now. _Whoof!_ Wow-ow! Whose dog art thou?"