kitter down the stream ahead of us. We saw the warblers and the
cedar-birds gathering in flocks for their southward flight, the
muskrats making their houses ready for the winter, and the porcupines
dumbly meditating and masticating among the branches of the young
poplar-trees. We also had a delightful interview with a wild-cat, and
almost a thrilling adventure with a bear.

The boy and I had started out from camp for an hour of evening fishing.
He went down the stream some distance ahead of me, as I supposed,
(though, as I afterward found, he had made a little detour and turned
back). I was making my way painfully through a spruce thicket when I
heard a loud crash and crackling of dead branches. "Hallo!" I cried;
"have you fallen down? Are you hurt?" No answer. "Hallo, Teddy!" I
shouted again; "what's the matter?" Another tremendous crash, and then
dead silence.

I dropped my rod and pushed as rapidly as possible in the direction
from which the sound had come. There I found a circle about fifty feet
in diameter torn and trampled as if a circus had been there. The ground
was trodden bare. Trees three and four inches thick were broken off.
The bark of the larger trees was stripped away. The place was a ruin. A
few paces away, among the bushes, there was a bear trap with some claws
in it, and an iron chain attached to the middle of a clog about four
feet long. The log hovel in which the trap had been set, we found
later, a little way back on an old wood road. Evidently a bear had been
caught there, perhaps two or three days before we came. He had dragged
the trap and the chained clog down into the thicket. There he had
stayed, tearing up things generally in his efforts to escape from his
encumbrance, and resting quietly in the intervals of his fury. My
approach had startled him and he had made the first crash that I heard.
Then he lay low and listened. My second inconsiderate shout of "Hallo,
_Teddy_!" had put such an enormous fear into him that he dashed through
the trees, caught the foolishly chained clog across two of them, and,
tearing himself loose, escaped with the loss of a couple of toes. Thus
ended our almost adventure with a bear. How glad the old fellow must
have been!

The moral is this: If you want a bear, you should set your trap with
the clog chained at one end, not around the middle: then it will trail
through the woods and not break loose. But the best way is not to want
a bear.

Our last camp was jus