We now learned, too, something of the reason of man's coming into the mountains. Sometimes men's dogs were lost in the woods, or they made friends with coyotes and ran wild; and they told the coyotes all they knew, and from them it spread to the other animals. We met one of these coyotes who had been friends with a dog, and she told us what the dog had told her. It was gold that the men were looking for, yellow, shining stuff that was found in the gravel in the river-beds. What men wanted with it she had no idea, as the dog himself did not know, and it was not good to eat; but they set great store by it, and were always looking for it everywhere, following up the streams and scratching and digging in the beds. If they found no gold in a stream, they left it and went on to another. Where they did find it they built houses and stayed, and more men came, and more, until towns grew up, with roads and horses and cows as we had seen. In many ways what the coyote told us agreed with what we had observed for ourselves, so we presumed it was true; though a coyote is too much like a wolf to be safe to trust as a general rule.
The next time that we came to a place where the men had been working I thought I would like to see some of the wonderful yellow stuff. There were mounds of earth, and a long ditch running slantwise away from the stream, and nobody seemed to be about; so I scrambled down into the ditch to look if any of the yellow stuff was there. I was walking slowly along, sniffing at the ground and the sides of the ditch, when suddenly out of a sort of cave in one side, and only a few yards from me, came a man! Wooffa was just behind me, and the cubs behind her, and he was evidently no less astonished than I, and much more frightened. With one yell, he clambered up the bank before I could make up my mind what to do, and rushed to a small tree or sapling near by, and then for the first time I learned that a man could climb. He went up fast, too, until he got to the first branches, when he stopped and looked down and shouted at us--I suppose with some idea of frightening us. But he had no thunder-stick, and we were not in the least afraid; so we followed him and looked at the tree. It was too thin for us to climb--for a bear has to have something solid to take hold of--or I would certainly have gone up after him. As it was, we sat about for a while looking at him, and waiting to see if he would come down again; but he showed no intention of doing that, and, as we did not know how soon other men might come, we left him and went on our way. But I did not go investigating empty ditches in the daylight any more.