One of our cedars was dead at the top, and Rat-tat used to come there nearly every day. Little chips and splinters of wood would come floating down to us, and once a lovely fat beetle grub that he had somehow overlooked came plump down under my very nose. If that was the kind of thing that he found up there, I was not surprised that he was fond of our tree. I would have gone up too, if I could; but the dead part would never have been safe for me.
Very soon we began to be taken out on long excursions, going all four together, as I have said, and then we began to learn how much that is nice to eat there is in the world.
You have probably no idea, for instance, how many good things there may be under one rotting log. Even if you do not get a mouse or a chipmunk, you are sure of a fringe of greenstuff which, from lack of sunlight, has grown white and juicy, and almost as sure of some mushrooms or other fungi, most of which are delicious. But before you can touch them 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 favourite 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-cubs who did not know any better than to walk about among his fish.