or pitfall had
entangled her swift feet. Moreover, she had chosen her den well, where
no man had ever stood, and where only the eyes of two children had seen
her at a distance. So the little ones grew and played in the sunshine,
and had yet to learn what fear meant.

One day at dusk the mother entered swiftly and, without giving them food
as she had always done, seized a cub and disappeared. For the little
one, which had never before ventured beyond sight of the den, it was a
long journey indeed that followed,--miles and miles beside roaring
brooks and mist-filled ravines, through gloomy woods where no light
entered, and over bare ridges where the big stars sparkled just over his
ears as he hung, limp as a rabbit skin, from his mother's great jaws. An
owl hooted dismally, _whoo-hooo!_ and though he knew the sound well in
his peaceful nights, it brought now a certain shiver. The wind went
sniffing suspiciously among the spruce branches; a startled bird chirped
and whirred away out of their path; the brook roared among the rocks; a
big salmon jumped and tumbled back with resounding splash, and jumped
again as if the otter were after him. There was a sudden sharp cry, the
first and last voice of a hare when the weasel rises up in front of him;
then silence, and the fitful rustle of his mother's pads moving
steadily, swiftly over dry leaves. And all these sounds of the
wilderness night spoke to the little cub of some new thing, of swift
feet that follow and of something unknown and terrible that waits for
all unwary wild things. So fear was born.

The long journey ended at last before a dark hole in the hillside; and
the smell of his mother, the only familiar thing in his first strange
pilgrimage, greeted the cub from the rocks on either side as he passed
in out of the starlight. He was dropped without a sound in a larger den,
on some fresh-gathered leaves and dead grass, and lay there all alone,
very still, with the new feeling trembling all over him. A long hour
passed; a second cub was laid beside him, and the mother vanished as
before; another hour, and the wolf cubs were all together again with the
mother feeding them. Nor did any of them know where they were, nor why
they had come, nor the long, long way that led back to where the trail
began.

Next day when they were called out to play they saw a different and more
gloomy landscape, a chaos of granite rocks, a forest of evergreen, the
white plunge and rolling mist