I stole out into the middle of the opening, and sat very still on a fallen log.  Ten minutes passed in intense silence.  Then a twig snapped behind me.  I turned—­and there was Mooween, just coming into the opening.  I shall not soon forget how he looked, standing there big and black in the moonlight; nor the growl deep down in his throat, that grew deeper as he watched me.  We looked straight into each other’s eyes a brief, uncertain moment.  Then he drew back silently into the dense shadow.

There is another side to Mooween’s character, fortunately a rare one, which is sometimes evident in the mating season, when his temper leads him to attack instead of running away, as usual; or when wounded, or cornered, or roused to frenzy in defense of the young.  Mooween is then a beast to be dreaded, a great savage brute, possessed of enormous strength and of a fiend’s cunning.  I have followed him wounded through the wilderness, when his every resting place was scarred with deep gashes, and where broken saplings testified mutely to the force of his blow.  Yet even here his natural timidity lies close to the surface, and his ferocity has been greatly exaggerated by hunters.

Altogether, Mooween the Bear is a peaceable fellow, and an interesting one, well worth studying.  His extreme wariness, however, enables him generally to escape observation; and there are undoubtedly many queer ways of his yet to be discovered by some one who, instead of trying to scare the life out of him by a shout or a rifle-shot in the rare moments when he shows himself, will have the patience to creep near, and find out just what he is doing.  Only in the deepest wilderness is he natural and unconscious.  There he roams about, entirely alone for the most part, supplying his numerous wants, and performing droll capers with all the gravity of an owl, when he thinks that not even Tookhees, the wood-mouse, is looking.