about in it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess that
had not been his in the days before the battle with the lynx. He had
looked upon life in a more ferocious aspect; he had fought; he had buried
his teeth in the flesh of a foe; and he had survived. And because of all
this, he carried himself more boldly, with a touch of defiance that was
new in him. He was no longer afraid of minor things, and much of his
timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased to press upon him
with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and ever-menacing.

He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much of
the killing of meat and began to play his part in it. And in his own dim
way he learned the law of meat. There were two kinds of life--his own
kind and the other kind. His own kind included his mother and himself.
The other kind included all live things that moved. But the other kind
was divided. One portion was what his own kind killed and ate. This
portion was composed of the non-killers and the small killers. The other
portion killed and ate his own kind, or was killed and eaten by his own
kind. And out of this classification arose the law. The aim of life was
meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters
and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the
law in clear, set terms and moralise about it. He did not even think the
law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.

He saw the law operating around him on every side. He had eaten the
ptarmigan chicks. The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother. The hawk
would also have eaten him. Later, when he had grown more formidable, he
wanted to eat the hawk. He had eaten the lynx kitten. The lynx-mother
would have eaten him had she not herself been killed and eaten. And so
it went. The law was being lived about him by all live things, and he
himself was part and parcel of the law. He was a killer. His only food
was meat, live meat, that ran away swiftly before him, or flew into the
air, or climbed trees, or hid in the ground, or faced him and fought with
him, or turned the tables and ran after him.

Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life as a
voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of
appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating
and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with vio