nip and tingle, would take
possession of him, moving him almost to hatred of even his special
friends, the manager and the clown.

One vaporous, golden afternoon in early autumn, the circus drew into
the little town of Edmundston, at the mouth of the Madawaska River.
When the noise of the train stopped, the soft roar of the Little Falls
grew audible,--a voice at which all the weary animals pricked their
ears, they knew not, most of them, why. But when the cars and cages
were run out into the fields, where the tents were to be raised, there
drew down from spruce-clad hills a faint fragrance which thrilled the
bear's nostrils, and stirred formless longings in his heart, and made
his ears deaf to the wild music of the falls. That fragrance,
imperceptible to nostrils less sensitive than his, was the breath of
his native wilderness, a message from the sombre solitudes of the
Squatook. He did not know that the lonely peak of Sugar Loaf was but
thirty or forty miles away. He knew only that something, in the air
and in his blood, was calling him to his own.

The bear--well-taught, well-mannered, well-content--was not regarded
as even remembering freedom, let alone desiring it. His fetters,
therefore, were at times little more than nominal, and he was never
very closely watched. Just on the edge of evening, when the dusk was
creeping up the valley and honey-scents from the fields mixed with the
tang of the dark spruce forests, his opportunity came. His trainer had
unhitched the chain from his collar and stooped over it to examine
some defect in the clasp.

At this instant that surge of impulse which, when it does come,
shatters routine and habit to bits, seized the bear. Without
premeditation, he dealt the trainer a cuff that knocked him clean over
a wagon-pole and broke his arm. Before any of the other attendants
could realize what had happened, the bear was beyond the circle of
wagons, and half-way across the buckwheat-fields. In ten minutes more
he was in the spicy glooms of the spruce-woods.

His years of association with men had given the bear a great
confidence in their resources. He was too crafty, therefore, to
slacken his efforts just because he had gained the longed-for woods.
He pressed on doggedly, at a shambling, loose-jointed, but very
effective run, till it was full night and the stars came out sharply
in the patches of clear, dark sky above the tree-tops. In the friendly
dark he halted to strip the sweet bu