m you
have to look after the insects. Mushrooms will wait, but the sooner you
catch beetles, and earwigs, and ants, and grubs, the better. It is
always worth while to roll a log over, if you can, no matter how much
trouble it costs; and a big stone is sometimes nearly as good.

Insects, of course, are small, and it would take a lot of ants, or even
beetles, to make a meal for a bear; but they are good, and they help
out. Some wild animals, especially those which prey upon others, eat a
lot at one time, and then starve till they can kill again. A bear, on
the other hand, is wandering about for more than half of the twenty-four
hours, except in the very heat of summer, and he is eating most of the
while that he wanders. The greater part of his food, of course, is
greenstuff--lily bulbs, white camas roots, wild-onions, and young shoots
and leaves. As he walks he browses a mouthful of young leaves here,
scratches up a root there, tears the bark off a decaying tree and eats
the insects underneath, lifts a stone and finds a mouse or a lizard
beneath, or loiters for twenty minutes over an ant-hill. With plenty of
time, he is never in a hurry, and every little counts.

But most of all in summer I used to love to go down to the stream. In
warm weather, during the heat of the day, bears stay in the shelter of
thickets, among the brush by the water or under the shade of a fallen
tree. As the sun sank we would move down to the stream, and lie all
through the long evening in the shallows, where the cold water rippled
against one's sides. And along the water there was always something good
to eat--not merely the herbage and the roots of the water-plants, but
frogs and insects of all sorts among the grass. Our favorite
bathing-place was just above a wide pool made by a beaver-dam. The pool
itself was deep in places, but before the river came to it, it flowed
for a hundred yards and more over a level gravel bottom, so shallow that
even as a cub I could walk from shore to shore without the water being
above my shoulders. At the edge of the pool the same black and white
kingfisher was always sitting on the same branch when we came down, and
he disliked our coming, and _chirred_ at us to go away. I used to love
to pretend not to understand him, and to walk solemnly through the water
underneath and all round his branch. It made him furious, and sent him
_chirring_ upstream to find another place to fish, where there were no
idiotic bear-cu