Tales of the Beartooth
Book One- Critter Encounters
by
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Suddenly the back door was wrenched open and in rushed Mama Bear. She was mad and she was hungry. Paying no attention whatever to Stella and myself, she made directly for the serving table and batted a plastic pitcher of syrup onto the floor. It took her only a few seconds to rip it open with her teeth and lap up the sticky mess. Then she made for the package of frozen sausages and knocked it on the floor as well. In the process, the bowl of pancake batter tumbled down also. The cook had been frozen with terror as the bear was slurping up the syrup and tearing open the package of sausages. But when she saw the bowl of spilled batter on the floor, she suddenly galvanized into action. Grabbing a skillet from the kitchen wall, she started advancing on the bear, skillet upraised and screaming: "You break into my kitchen. "You mess up my floor. "You spill my sourdough starter. "Now you get out of here and you stay out or I bust your head open with this frying pan." The startled bear looked up and saw the cook advancing toward her with the skillet. Something must have warned her that this angry woman was not to be tampered with for she suddenly abandoned the frozen sausages, whirled around and headed for the door on fours. I had been watching this confrontation in stunned amazement. When the bear had disappeared into the darkness, I turned to the cook, still brandishing the frying pan, and asked: "Stella, up ‘till now you have been terrified at the thought of meeting up with the bear. You even told me you would quit if she ever came back. What got into you?" Stella slowly lowered the hand holding the frying pan and answered: "Mister, that bear ruined my sourdough starter.
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About the Book
The snow-capped Beartooth Mountains, Montana's highest and most rugged, lie on the northern rim of Yellowstone National Park, and separate Montana from Wyoming. It was to this remote and forbidding area inhabited by bears, mountain lions, moose deer, Big Horn Sheep, beaver, and many other forms of wildlife that the author settled down with a new wife and a newly-adopted son, after flying combat in three wars. There, with the help of two older sons, they carved the Stillwater Valley Guest Ranch and the Montana School of Fly Fishing out of the Beartooth Wilderness. This book describes the daunting - but eventually successful - attempts by the author and his family to live in peace and harmony among all of these beautiful, but often difficult and cantankerous (especially the thieving bears and the persistent beavers), without harming a single one of them.
About the Author
John C. Mouat was born in 1921, in a two-room log cabin on a ranch near Custer, Montana--not far from the site of the Little Big Horn River where General Custer and many of his troops were massacred in 1876. He attended a one-room schoolhouse using a horse and buggy for transportation. During World War II, he piloted 8th Air Force B-17 Flying Fortresses from a base in England to targets in Germany. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery during a raid on the ball-bearing plant in Schweinfurt. He also flew combat in Korea from 1950 to 1953. He retired from the Air Force to a remote ranch in Montana’s Beartooth Mountains just outside Yellowstone Park. He has written two Tales of the Beartooth books about wildlife, dudes, and cowboys in the Beartooths as well as a novel about the "Flying Tigers" and the War in Korea. He has plans for three more books – another of the Tales of the Beartooth series, a novel of the Vietnam War, and a third book on a subject he has not disclosed. Colonel Mouat lives with his wife, Carolynn, in Cape Canaveral, Florida.