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.
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