of a mountain torrent; but no silver sea
with fishing-boats drifting over it, like clouds in the sea over their
heads, and no gray hut with children running about like ants on the
distant shore. And as they played they began for the first time to
imitate the old mother keeping guard over them, sitting up often to
watch and listen and sift the winds, trying to understand what fear was,
and why they had been taken away from the sunny hillside where the world
was so much bigger and brighter than here. But home is where mother
is,--that, fortunately, is also true of the little Wood Folk, who
understand it in their own savage way for a season,--and in their wonder
at their new surroundings the memory of the old home gradually faded
away. They never knew with what endless care the new den had been
chosen; how the mother, in the days when she knew she was watched, had
searched it out and watched over it and put her nose to every ridge and
ravine and brook-side, day after day, till she was sure that no foot
save that of the wild things had touched the soil within miles of the
place. They felt only a greater wildness, a deeper solitude; and they
never forgot, though they were unmolested, the strange feeling that was
born in them on that first terrifying night journey in their mother's
jaws.

* * * * *

Soon the food that was brought home at dawn--the rabbit or grouse, or
the bunch of rats hanging by their tails, with which the mother
supplemented their midday drink of milk--became altogether too scant to
satisfy their clamorous appetites; and in the bright afternoons and the
long summer twilights the mother led them forth on short journeys to
hunt for themselves. No big caribou or cunning fox cub, as one might
suppose, but "rats and mice and such small deer" were the limit of the
mother's ambition for her little ones. They began on stupid grubs that
one could find asleep under stones and roots, and then on beetles that
scrambled away briskly at the first alarm, and then, when the sunshine
was brightest, on grasshoppers,--lively, wary fellows that zipped and
buzzed away just when you were sure you had them, and that generally
landed from an astounding jump facing in a different direction, like a
flea, so as to be ready for your next move.

It was astonishing how quickly the cubs learned that game is not to be
picked up tamely, like huckleberries, and changed their style of
hunting,--creeping, in