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The Caughtcha Bear by Rick Kastle Share the Bear's real name was Sharon, but nobody ever called her that. When her friends weren't mad at her, they called her Share, or Share the Bear if they were being formal, and when they were mad at her, they called her the Caughtcha Bear. This strange name came about because Share was a very playful young bear, and her favorite game was to sneak quietly up behind her little friends, pounce on them and shriek, "Caughtcha!" Then, of course, she'd go into peals of merry laughter at the frightened behavior of her friends. Babbit the Rabbit, for example, would squeal in terror, and thump on the ground with his hind feet until Share let him go, and then he'd run to his burrow as fast as he could go. Beasle the Weasel used to snarl and squirm around and try to bite the Caughtcha Bear's big heavy paw. When Share played Caughtcha Bear with Zoose the Moose Calf, she would jump on his back and hang on while Zoose would plunge and kick like a bucking bronco. Herman the Ermine, who had very keen hearing, could always hear the Caughtcha Bear coming and would never be there when Share pounced. Share thought this was really a pity, because playing Caughtcha Bear was lots of fun, and she was afraid Herman wasn't having much fun. Both Wilcox Fox and Jinx the Lynx were very bad tempered, Share thought, and each of them had bitten her twice before she decided that they were just sourpusses and didn't like fun. Share the Bear had funny feelings about two animals in the forest. She felt that Lunk the Skunk wasn't much fun to play with because he lost his self control too easily. And Emmaline the Porcupine tended to be rather sharp with her. So Share never played games with those two animals and they liked her fairly well. One bright sunny morning, Share was sitting on a large old pine stump, looking off at the mountains on the other side of the river and feeling lonely and sad. She hadn't played with any of her friends for a long time. Zoose had left the clearing just before she got there. "I guess he didn't know I was coming," she thought, "only somehow I thought he did." Wilcox and Jinx had been quite cross when she saw them playing tag and started to join them with a loud "Caughtcha!" Herman had darted like lightning for a hole when Share came along and he had said, "Sorry, can't stop to play now, I'm on the trail of my dinner!" When she went to see if Babbit could play, she had found him with just his nose sticking out of his burrow and all the rest of him hidden. Of course she couldn't play Caughtcha Bear that way, so she left Babbit alone and went to her favorite place for being unhappy in. As Share sat there in the warm sun, listening to a bee in the clover nearby, she looked back at the trail on which she had come to the old stump. She saw her own footprints in the dirt, and thought, "My, I'm a big, heavy bear." She looked a bit farther along the trail and saw a good, strong branch that she had broken when she stepped on it. She thought, "I'm getting to be a very heavy bear." Then she noticed the deep claw marks on the trunk of an old dead birch tree where she had been looking for grubs yesterday for dessert. "Hmm," she thought, "I've got very sharp, strong claws." She was beginning to feel quite proud and happy that she was so big and strong and had such sharp claws, but she also began to feel a little uneasy, as if she had just told herself something but hadn't listened very well. She said out loud to the bee, "I should be proud and happy to be so big and strong, but here I am, unhappy because my friends won't play with me." She looked back at the broken branch again and said, "Hmmm." Then she said, "Oh my!" A little later she said, "Poor Babbit and Beasle." She looked at the claw marks on the tree, and said, "Heavens to Betsy, poor Zoose!" Then she looked at her tracks pressed deep into the dirt and mumbled, "I'm a very heavy bear. . .and Wilcox is really a rather small fox, and. . . I guess all the Lynx and Ermine are quite small. And. . .no wonder. . .!" "I'm just way too big and strong. All my friends are too small to play my kind of game with me. What can I do?" she asked the bee. "What am I good for?" She had just about decided she wasn't much good for anything, when suddenly she heard a loud commotion up stream on the river. Zoose the Moose yelled, "Do something, somebody!" Babbit was shrieking, "Help her, help her!" Share couldn't even understand what Beasle, Wilcox and Herman were screaming, but they were certainly making a lot of noise. Lunk moaned, "How did it happen, how ever could it happen?" Emmaline was crying, "The poor Cougar child, oh, poor Pooka!" In two swift bounds, Share was at the edge of the river. She looked upstream to where the noise was coming from and saw what it was all about. There, floating in the middle of the stream, in the fastest current, was a large broken tree limb. On the limb was Pooka Cougar, the young daughter of the Mountain Lion family. The limb was floating by very rapidly, and Share just had time to think, "Pooka must have been sunning herself on a branch that hung out over the water and the branch broke off," when she had another thought, this one very frightening. The river flowed around the bend just about ten large bounds downstream, and then went over a very high waterfall. No animal in the forest would still be alive after a fall like that. All of the animals ran as quickly as they could to where the waterfall was, all trying desperately to think of a way to save Pooka. But when they got there, no one said anything for a moment. They could see nothing to be done. There was a tree limb that hung out over the river quite a way, but it was much too high above the foaming river to be of any help. But then Share looked at the limb and said, "If there were only a large, heavy animal with long sharp claws to hang on with, she could climb out on that limb, and bend it down enough that Pooka would be within reach." The next instant, there was a large, heavy animal with sharp claws inching her way out onto that limb. Her name was Share the Bear. As she worked her way farther and farther out, the limb bent down lower and lower toward the river. Just as Pooka was about to go over the falls, Share reached down like a flash, grabbed Pooka from her floating limb and shrieked, "Caughtcha!" Share clung tightly to Pooka, and Pooka clung even more tightly to Share, and they slowly and carefully climbed back to shore along the limb. All the other animals were cheering and telling each other what a wonderful rescue it had been. When at last they reached safety, and Share had put Pooka down, and Pooka had let go of Share, the Caughtcha Bear looked at Pooka and said, "Why you're just about as big as I am!" And Pooka said, "Yes, I am, and I'll bet I'm just as strong too!" "Share said, hesitatingly, "Would you like to play Caughtcha Bear with me sometime?" Pooka laughed and said, "Well, I've always called it Caughtcha Cougar, but I think we mean the same thing, and I think it would be wonderful to have someone my own size and with claws as sharp as mine to play Caughtcha with." All the other animals in the forest thought it was wonderful too. And with a great feeling of relief and happiness over the rescue and things, they all went back to what they had been doing before the adventure, while Share and Pooka could be heard romping up the stream, laughing and shouting, and taking turns yelling, "Caughtcha!"
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