We children pity the bear, as we watch, and forget the other animal that frightens us when near the woods at night.  But he passes on at last, with a troop of boys following to the town limits.  Next day Bruin comes back, and lives in imagination as ugly and frightful as ever.

But Mooween the Bear, as the northern Indians call him, the animal that lives up in the woods of Maine and Canada, is a very different kind of creature.  He is big and glossy black, with long white teeth and sharp black claws, like the imagination bear.  Unlike him, however, he is shy and wild, and timid as any rabbit.  When you camp in the wilderness at night, the rabbit will come out of his form in the ferns to pull at your shoe, or nibble a hole in the salt bag, while you sleep.  He will play twenty pranks under your very eyes.  But if you would see Mooween, you must camp many summers, and tramp many a weary mile through the big forests before catching a glimpse of him, or seeing any trace save the deep tracks, like a barefoot boy’s, left in some soft bit of earth in his hurried flight.

Mooween’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.