his head, and made her the hope and symbol of
his possible best.

A woman's long cry, like the appeal of that one on whom he meditated,
echoed through the woods and startled him out of his wallow.

III

I sat up with the water trickling down my back. The cry was repeated,
out of the west.

I knew the woods, but night alters the most familiar places. It was so
dark in vaults and tunnels of trees and thickets that I might have
burrowed through the ground almost as easily as thresh a path. The
million scarcely audible noises that fill a forest surrounded me, and
twigs not broken by me cracked or shook. Still I made directly toward
the woman's voice which guided me more plainly; but left off running as
my ear detected that she was only in perplexity. She called at
intervals, imperatively but not in continuous screams. She was a white
woman; for no squaw would publish her discomfort. A squaw if lost would
camp sensibly on a bed of leaves, and find her way back to the village
in the morning. The wilderness was full of dangers, but when you are
elder brother to the bear and the wildcat you learn their habits, and
avoid or outwit them.

Climbing over rocks and windfalls I came against a solid log wall and
heard the woman talking in a very pretty chatter the other side of it.
She only left off talking to call for help, and left off calling for
help to scold and laugh again. There was a man imprisoned with her, and
they were speaking English, a language I did not then understand. But
what had happened to them was very plain. They had wandered into a pen
built by hunters to trap bears, and could not find the bush-masked and
winding opening, but were traveling around the walls. It was lucky for
them that a bear had not arrived first, though in that case their horses
must have smelled him. I heard the beasts shaking their bridles.

I found my way to the opening, and whistled. At once the woman ceased
her chatter and drew in her breath, and they both asked me a question
that needed no interpretation. I told them where they were, and the
woman began talking at once in my own tongue and spoke it as well as I
could myself.

"In a bear pen? George, he says we are in a bear pen! Take us out, dear
chief, before the bear family arrive home from their ball. I don't know
whether you are a chief or not, but most Indians are. My nurse was a
chief's daughter. Where are you? I can't see anything but chunks of
blackness."

I too