136 Musings by Camp-Fire and Wayside 



would probably have had to say about it. "The 

 cub would have squealed, and she'd 'a' gone for us, 

 sure," said Georgie. "But," I said, "we have no 

 gun, and not even a knife; and what would we have 

 done then?" "We'd 'a' had to let the cubs go and 

 climbed trees ourselves," said Georgie. But "It is 

 too bad," was his refrain, "we'd 'a' got mebby 

 twenty dollars apiece for them." While chasing 

 the cub, which was large enough to make an ugly 

 fight on his own account, I did not think of the 

 necessity of asking leave of his mother. As for 

 themselves, the cubs probably thought they each 

 knew more than their mother. That is the way 

 with cubs in these times. 



I feel sorry for the bears this year. Last year 

 the whole country was covered with blackberries 

 and whortleberries. (The blackberry gets its name 

 from its color. The whortleberry, a different va- 

 riety of the same species, is black and sweeter.) 

 The late frost, which killed the first planting of 

 our garden, killed them all, so that the bears must 

 live by rooting, frogging, and fishing. 



The isolated lakes in this region have been a 

 mystery to me, and I find no adequate explanation 

 proposed in the works on geology. These lakes 

 are all essentially alike — depressions in the sand, 

 without visible outlet or inlet — as indeed they need 

 none, the water flowing freely through the hills from 

 one to the other. Wherever a depression goes 

 down to the water level there is a lake, from two 



