1 88 M^ays of Wood Folk. 



We children pity the bear, as we watch, and forget 

 the other animal that frightens us when near the 

 woods at night. But he passes on at last, with a 

 troop of boys following to the town limits. Next day 

 Bruin comes back, and lives in imagination as ugly 

 and frightful as ever. 



But Mooween the Bear, as the northern Indians 

 call him, the animal that lives up in the woods of 

 Maine and Canada, is a very different kind of creature. 

 He is big and glossy black, with long white teeth 

 and sharp black claws, like the imagination bear. 

 Unlike him, however, he is shy and wild, and timid as 

 any rabbit. When you camp in the wilderness at 

 night, the rabbit will come out of his form in the 

 ferns to pull at your shoe, or nibble a hole in the salt , 

 bag, while you sleep. He will play twenty pranks 

 under your very eyes. But if you would see Mooween, 

 you must camp many summers, and tramp many a 

 weary mile through the big forests before catching a 

 glimpse of him, or seeing any trace save the deep 

 tracks, like a barefoot boy's, left in some soft bit of 

 earth in his hurried flio-ht. 



Mooween's ears are cjuick, and his nose very keen. 

 The slightest warning from either will generally send 

 him off to the densest cover or the roughest hillside 

 in the neighborhood. Silently as a black shadow he 

 glides away, if he has detected your approach from a 



