Page 12 - A Hero of Ticonderoga

Sometimes Martha spent part of a day in camp with her brother, helping in
womanly ways that girls so early acquired in the training of those times,

when every one of the household must learn helpfulness and self-reliance.
But the little sister enjoyed most the evenings when the syrup was taken to

the house and sugared off. The children surfeited themselves with sugar
"waxed" on snow, and their parents, and Job, if he chanced to be there,
shared of this most delicious of the few backwoods luxuries, and the five

made a jolly family party.

One morning, when the surface of the coarse-grained old snow was covered
with one of the light later falls, known as "sugar snow," as Seth and his son
were on their way to the sugar place, the latter called his father’s attention

to a large track bearing some resemblance to the imprint of a naked human
foot, and tending with some meandering in the same direction that they

were going.

"Why," said Seth, at the first glance, "it’s a bear, an’ if he’s been to the

camp, I’m afraid he’s done mischief, for they’re meddlesome creatur’s. But
there wa’n’t much left there for him to hurt," he added, after taking a brief

mental inventory of the camp’s contents.

"I can’t think of nothing but the hunk of pork we had to keep the big kittle

from b’ilin’ over," said Nathan, "and a little mite of syrup that we left in the
little kittle ’cause there was more’n we could carry home in the pails."

"He’s welcome to that if he’s left the pork; we hain’t no pork to feed bears."

Now, as they drew near the camp, they heard a strange commotion in its
neighborhood; a medley of smothered angry growls, impatient whines,

unwieldy floundering, and a dull thud and clank of iron, the excited
squalling of a party of jays, and the chattering jeers of a red squirrel.
Running forward in cautious haste, they presently discovered the cause of

this odd confusion of noises to be a large black bear.

His head was concealed in the pot-bellied syrup kettle, held fast in that
position by the bail, that, in his eagerness to lick out the last drop of stolen