The boys would have taken them all; but Mrs. Sumerford objected, because, though the dogs and the bear agreed well at home where they had been taught to show due respect to his bearship, it was quite the reverse when they were not under the inspection of their masters, the dogs always being the aggressors. Therefore the dogs were shut up in the house till the boys were gone, when Mrs. Sumerford let them out, and gave them their breakfast. Coons are wont to sleep in the daytime, and forage in the night. A favorite resort of these creatures is the evergreen trees with close foliage, among which it is not easy to see them. There, after a hearty meal, they coil themselves around the tree, lying upon the limbs at their junction with the trunks, and sleeping. The boys were no novices in the art of finding them: one or two would climb the tree, and drive them to the top, or upon the outer limbs, and the others shoot them. They liked best to shoot pigeons when they could find them on the ground, or on low bushes feeding on berries. In shooting into the tops of trees, if they missed their aim, the arrows were likely to stick in a limb or some part of the tree, in which case it was not only some work to recover them, but the points of the flint ones were liable to be broken, and those of the iron ones bent, or if steel they were sometimes broken. They had killed four coons, finding a whole family in one tree, and a partridge, and were now in pursuit of pigeons, creeping on their hands and knees among the bushes; and the bear, as fond of berries as the pigeons, was improving the opportunity, lying down on the loaded bushes, and eating while the juice ran in streams from either side of his mouth. The pigeons were accustomed to bears, had no fear of them, would feed right under their noses. Archie Crawford knew this, and was crawling up to some pigeons, and sheltering himself from their notice behind the body of the bear, when from under a windfall out rushed a wild bear, followed by two cubs, and growling savagely. The civilized bear neither manifested fear nor a wish to quarrel. The boys, on the other hand, strong in numbers, and many of them armed with steel-pointed arrows, were delighted with the prospect of a duel between two such antagonists, and shouted,-- "Go at her, baby! clinch her! you can lick her: we'll back you." While baby's bear was mildly regarding his savage antagonist, the hairs of whose coat stood upright with anger, the white foam flying from her lips, and who was working herself into a great rage, one of the cubs ventured up to baby's bear, who, putting down his nose, smelled of the cub, and licked it with his tongue.