the slash of her fangs. For
this, likewise, he respected his mother. She compelled obedience from
him, and the older he grew the shorter grew her temper.

Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once more
the bite of hunger. The she-wolf ran herself thin in the quest for meat.
She rarely slept any more in the cave, spending most of her time on the
meat-trail, and spending it vainly. This famine was not a long one, but
it was severe while it lasted. The cub found no more milk in his
mother's breast, nor did he get one mouthful of meat for himself.

Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he
hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing. Yet the failure of it
accelerated his development. He studied the habits of the squirrel with
greater carefulness, and strove with greater craft to steal upon it and
surprise it. He studied the wood-mice and tried to dig them out of their
burrows; and he learned much about the ways of moose-birds and
woodpeckers. And there came a day when the hawk's shadow did not drive
him crouching into the bushes. He had grown stronger and wiser, and more
confident. Also, he was desperate. So he sat on his haunches,
conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the
sky. For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat,
the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently. But the hawk refused
to come down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket and
whimpered his disappointment and hunger.

The famine broke. The she-wolf brought home meat. It was strange meat,
different from any she had ever brought before. It was a lynx kitten,
partly grown, like the cub, but not so large. And it was all for him.
His mother had satisfied her hunger elsewhere; though he did not know
that it was the rest of the lynx litter that had gone to satisfy her. Nor
did he know the desperateness of her deed. He knew only that the velvet-
furred kitten was meat, and he ate and waxed happier with every mouthful.

A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave,
sleeping against his mother's side. He was aroused by her snarling.
Never had he heard her snarl so terribly. Possibly in her whole life it
was the most terrible snarl she ever gave. There was reason for it, and
none knew it better than she. A lynx's lair is not despoiled with
impunity. In the full glare of the afternoon light, cr