nd crevice, through the ghostly, noiseless contention of
sunlight and moonlight. Now their moving shadows lay one way, now the
other; and now their shadows were suddenly wiped out, as the two
lights for a moment held an even balance. At length having reached a
little plateau where the berries were particularly large and
close-clustered, the old bear stopped, and they fell joyously to their
feeding.

On these open heights there were no enemies to keep watch against, and
there was no reason to be wary or silent. The bears fed noisily,
therefore, stripping the plump fruit cleverly by the pawful, and
munching with little, greedy grunts of delight. There was no other
food quite so to their taste as these berries, unless, perhaps, a
well-filled honey-comb. And this was their season for eating, eating,
eating, all the time, in order to lay up abundant fat against the long
severity of winter.

As the bushes about them were stripped of the best fruit, the shaggy
feasters moved around the shoulder of the mountain from the gold of
the sun into the silver of the moon. Soon the sunset had faded, and
the moon had it all her own way except for a broad expanse of
sea-green sky in the west, deepening through violet to a narrow streak
of copper on the horizon. By this time the shadows, especially on the
eastern slope, were very sharp and black, and the open spaces very
white and radiant, with a strange transparency borrowed from that
high, pure atmosphere.

It chanced that the little hollow on which the bears were just now
revelling,--a hollow where the blueberries were unbelievably large and
abundant--was bounded on its upper side, toward the steep, by a narrow
and deep crevice. At one end of the cleft, from a rocky and shallow
roothold, a gnarled birch grew slantingly. From its unusual situation,
and from the fact that the bushes grew thick to its very edge, this
crevice constituted nothing less than a most insidious trap.

One of the cubs, born with the instinct of caution, kept far away from
the dangerous brink without having more than half realized that there
was any danger there whatever. The other cub was one of those
blundering fellows, to be found among the wild kindreds no less than
among the kindreds of men, who only get caution hammered into them by
experience. He saw a narrow break, indeed, between the berry patch and
the bare steep above,--but what was a little crevice in a position
like this, where it could not amount