find a region where he had never been. But it seemed as if
man now was pushing in everywhere. We did not see him, but continually
we came across the traces of him along the banks of the streams. The
beavers, and the kingfishers, of course, know everything that goes on
along the rivers. Nothing can pass upstream or down without going by the
beaver-dams, and the beavers are always on the watch. You might linger
about a beaver-dam all day, and except for the smell, which a man would
not notice, you would not believe there was a beaver near. But they are
watching you from the cracks and holes in their homes, and in the
evening, if they are not afraid of you, you will be astonished to see
twenty or thirty beavers come out to play about what you thought was an
empty house. We never passed a dam without asking about man, and always
it was the same tale. Men had been there a week ago, or the day before,
or when the moon last was full. And the kingfishers and the ospreys told
us the same things. So we kept on our way southward.

As the days went on I grew to think less of Kahwa; the memory of those
nights spent in the town, with the lights, and the strange noises, and
the warm man-smell all about me, began to fade until they all seemed
more like incidents of a dream than scenes which I had actually lived
through only a few weeks before. I began to feel more as I used to feel
in the good old days before the fire, and came again to be a part of the
wild, wholesome life of the woods. Moreover, I was growing; my mother
said that I was growing fast. No puma would have dared to touch me now,
and my unusual experiences about the town had bred in me a spirit of
independence and self-reliance, so that other cubs of my own age whom we
met, and who, of course, had lived always with their parents, always
seemed to me younger than I; and certainly I was bigger and stronger
than any first-year bear that I saw. On the whole, I would have been
fairly contented with life had it not been for the estrangement which
was somehow growing up between my father and myself. I could not help
feeling that, though I knew not why, he would have been glad to have me
go away again. So I kept out of his way as much as possible, seldom
speaking to him, and, of course, not venturing to share any food that he
found. On the first evening after my return he had rolled over an old
log, and mother and I went up as a matter of course to see what was
there; but he growle