Mystery of the Bear Cub by Tamra Wight

Author:Tamra Wight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Islandport Press
Published: 2017-11-21T14:27:37+00:00

“Wait! No!” Roy put up a hand, as if she was going to do it right that second. “Mr. Goodwin says there’s a cub,” he added, ducking his head. “Don’t separate them. Please.”

The warden looked thoughtfully at the bear, then at us. “A cub? Interesting. Mary didn’t tell me that. Okay. I’ll talk to Mr. Goodwin and see what we can do to frustrate the bear into looking elsewhere for food. This trash situation . . .”

I hung my head, and the warden put a hand on my shoulder. “That’s not a complaint, Cooper. None of this is your fault. The town manager shouldn’t have closed the transfer station. I personally believe he could have kept it open during the renovations. Now he’s announced they need more time, two more weeks, to get it ready.”

All three of us gasped. Another two weeks! No wonder everybody was so angry.

Warden Kate looked at the bear again. “Okay, so let’s try this. I’ll teach Mr. Goodwin a few tricks to discourage the bear and her cub—things like washing out all his cans and raking the area. I even have a few bear-proof trash cans I can let him try out. And we’ll hope she moves along.”

Warden Kate signaled to her assistant, who was sitting in the passenger seat of her truck. He stepped out with a metal trash-can lid and giant spoon.

“The old-fashioned way to scare off bears,” she said, eyes twinkling.

“How many chances will you give her?” Roy asked softly.

“Two, because she knows there’s food here and is bound to come back and try at least one more time. I’m hoping after two tries, and not getting food, and getting scared into leaving, she’ll go back to living her life the way she was meant to live it.”

“I could loan this to Mr. Goodwin,” Packrat suggested, pulling an air horn from his pocket.

The warden smiled. “Great idea.”

The big bear had her head back in the first can, the one with the bag of trash. Warden Kate shooed us back inside the screen door. Her assistant stood in the back of the pickup truck and, at a nod from the warden, he hit the lid with the spoon. The bear backed up so fast, she practically fell over trying to get out. When she was free of the can, she turned toward the sound and stood up on her hind legs.

“Yep, looks like she has one or more cubs.” Warden Kate pointed to the bear’s stomach, where teats showed through the fur. The warden looked into the woods. “It’s probably hiding in there, up in a tree or behind the bushes.”

“Won’t this noise scare off the cub, too?” Packrat looked worriedly toward the tree line.

The bear plopped back on all fours and ran for the woods.

“It’ll follow its mother,” Warden Kate said.

Remembering the scared eyes of the cub we’d rescued in the field, I imagined the one in the woods here probably felt about the same.

“It’s okay, little one,” I whispered, imagining this cub up a tree, watching these humans scare its mother.

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