tle feller."

FROM THE TEETH OF THE TIDE

HITHERTO, ever since he had been old enough to leave the den, the
mother bear had been leading her fat black cub inland, among the
tumbled rocks and tangled spruce and pine, teaching him to dig for
tender roots and nose out grubs and beetles from the rotting stumps.
To-day, feeling the need of saltier fare, she led him in the opposite
direction, down through a cleft in the cliffs, and out across the
great, red, glistening mud-flats left bare by the ebb of the terrific
Fundy tides.

From the secure warmth of his den the cub had heard, faint and far
off, the waves thundering along the bases of the cliffs, when the tide
was high and the great winds drew heavily in from sea. The sound had
always made him afraid; and to-day, though there was no wind, and the
tide was so far out that it made no noise but a soft whisper, silken
and persuasive, he held back with babyish timidity, till his mother
brought him to his senses with an unceremonious cuff on the side of
the head. With a squall of grieved surprise he picked himself up,
shaking his head as if he had a bee in his ear, and then made haste to
follow obediently, close at his mother's huge black heels.

From the break in the cliffs, where the bears came down, ran a ledge
of shelving rocks on a long, gradual slant across the flats toward the
edge of low water. The tide was nearing the last of the ebb; and now,
the slope of the shore being very gradual, and the difference between
high and low water in these turbulent channels something between forty
and fifty feet, the lapsing fringes of the ebb, yellow-tawny with
silt, were a good three-quarters of a mile away from the foot of the
cliffs. The vast spaces between were smooth, oily, copper-red mud,
shining and treacherous in the sun with the narrow black outcrop of
the ledge drawn across on so gentle a slant that before it reached the
water it was running almost on a parallel with the shoreline.

Along the rocky ledge the old bear led the way, pausing to nose at a
patch of seaweed here and there or to glance shrewdly into the shallow
pools among the rocks. The cub obediently followed her example,
though doubtless with no idea of what he might hope to find. But the
upper stretches of the ledge, near high-water mark, offered nothing to
reward their quest, having been dry for several hours, and long ago
thoroughly gone over by earlier foragers. So the bears pushed on down
towa