Once, however, he varied his program, and gave me a terrible start, letting me know for a moment just how it feels to be hunted, at the same time showing with what marvelous stillness he can glide through the thickest cover when he chooses.

It was early evening on a forest lake.  The water lay like a great mirror, with the sunset splendor still upon it.  The hush of twilight was over the wilderness.  Only the hermit-thrushes sang wild and sweet from a hundred dead spruce tops.

I was drifting about, partly in the hope to meet Mooween, whose tracks were very numerous at the lower end of the lake, when I heard him walking in the shallow water.  Through the glass I made him out against the shore, as he plodded along in my direction.

I had long been curious to know how near a bear would come to a man without discovering him.  Here was an opportunity.  The wind at sunset had been in my favor; now there was not the faintest breath stirring.

Hiding the canoe, I sat down in the sand on a little point, where dense bushes grew down to within a few feet of the water’s edge.  Head and shoulders were in plain sight above the water-grass.  My intentions were wholly peaceable, notwithstanding the rifle that lay across my knees.  It was near the mating season, when Mooween’s temper is often dangerous; and one felt much more comfortable with the chill of the cold iron in his hands.

Mooween came rapidly along the shore meanwhile, evidently anxious to reach the other end of the lake.  In the mating season bears use the margins of lakes and streams as natural highways.  As he drew nearer and nearer I gazed with a kind of fascination at the big unconscious brute.  He carried his head low, and dropped his feet with a heavy splash into the shallow water.

At twenty yards he stopped as if struck, with head up and one paw lifted, sniffing suspiciously.  Even then he did not see me, though only the open shore lay between us.  He did not use his eyes at all, but laid his great head back on his shoulders and sniffed in every direction, rocking his brown muzzle up and down the while, so as to take in every atom from the tainted air.

A few slow careful steps forward, and he stopped again, looked straight into my eyes, then beyond me towards the lake, all the while sniffing.  I was still only part of the shore.  Yet he was so near that I caught the gleam of his eyes, and saw the nostrils swell and the muzzle twitch nervously.

Another step or two, and he planted his fore feet firmly.  The long hairs began to rise along his spine, and under his wrinkled chops was a flash of white teeth.  Still he had no suspicion of the motionless object there in the grass.  He looked rather out on the lake.  Then he glided into the brush and was lost to sight and hearing.

He was so close that I scarcely dared breathe as I waited, expecting him to come out farther down the shore.  Five minutes passed without the slightest sound to indicate his whereabouts, though I was listening intently in the dead hush that was on the lake.  All the while I smelled him strongly.  One can smell a bear almost as far as he can a deer, though the scent does not cling so long to the underbrush.