It was, as I have said, a dangerous life, and we knew it; but we were driven to it, and we trusted to our experience, our cunning, and our strength, to pull us through somehow.
Winter came, and we ought to have gone to our dens, but we were not fit for it. We were too poorly fed and thin, and hunger would probably have driven us out in midwinter. It was better to stay out now. So we stayed, keeping for the most part in the immediate neighbourhood of a number of men's houses along a certain stream. It was not a town, though there was one a few miles further down the stream; but for a distance of a mile or more on both sides of the water there were houses every hundred yards or so, and all day long men were at work digging and working in the ground along by the water looking for gold. We had kept all other bears away from the place, and, living in the mountains during the day, we used to come down at night, never going near the same house on two nights in succession, but being sometimes on one side of the stream, which was easily crossed, and sometimes on the other, and paying our visits wherever we thought we were least likely to be expected. Some nights we would not go near the houses at all, but would content ourselves with such food as we could find in the woods, though now in the bitter cold it was hard to find anything.
Early one morning, after one of these nights when we had kept away from the houses, we came across a trap. It evidently was a trap, because there was the bait put out temptingly in plain sight, not on the ground this time, but about a foot from the ground, tied to a stick. The curious thing about it was, however, that the whole affair was inside some sort of a house; or, rather, there were the three walls and roof of a small house, but there was no front to it--that was all open; and there, well inside, was the bait. I did not know why men had been at so much pains to build the house round the trap, but I had no doubt that if I approached the bait with proper caution, and scratched at it, the steel jaws would spring out as usual from somewhere, and then we could eat the meat. And we were all four distressingly hungry.
So I told the others to stay behind while I went into the house and sprung the trap and brought the meat out to them. I went in, and began to scratch about on the ground where I supposed the usual trap to be; but there was nothing there but the hard, dry earth. This puzzled me, but the lump of meat tied to the stake was an obvious fact; and I was hungry. At last, since, scratch as I would, no steel jaws appeared from anywhere, nor was there any place where they could be concealed, nothing remained but to take the meat boldly. I reached for it with my paw, but it was firmly tied; so I took it in my mouth and pulled. As I did so I heard a sudden movement behind me. A log had fallen behind me, almost blocking up the door. Well, I would move that away when I had the meat, I thought, and, seizing it firmly in my mouth, I tore it from its fastenings and turned to take it to the others waiting outside. But the log across the door was bigger than I thought; it completely blocked my passage, and when I gave it a push it did not yield.