light sleepers all, were already
awake and floundering madly back to the water. But for one of them,
and that one the Pup's assistant mother, the alarm came too late. Just
as she was turning, bewildered with terror of she knew not what, the
dark bulk of the bear landed upon her, crushing her down. A terrific
blow on the muzzle broke her skull, and she collapsed into a quivering
mass. The rest of the band, after a moment of loud splashing, swam off
noiselessly for the safe retreat of the outer ledges. And the bear,
after shaking the body of his victim to make sure it was quite dead,
dragged it away with a grunt of satisfaction into the fir wood.

After this tragedy, though the travellers continued to ascend the
creeks and inlets when the whim so moved them, they took care to
choose for sleep the ruder security of outlying rocks and islands,
and cherished, by night and by day, a wholesome distrust of
dark fir woods. But for all their watchfulness their journeying was
care-free and joyous, and from time to time, as they went, their
light-heartedness would break out into aimless gambols, or something
very like a children's game of tag. Nothing, however, checked their
progress southward, and presently, turning into the Belle Isle
Straits, they came to summer skies and softer weather. At this point,
under the guidance of an old male who had followed the southward track
before, they forsook the Labrador shore-line and headed fearlessly out
across the strait till they reached the coast of Newfoundland. This
coast they followed westward till they gained the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, then, turning south, worked their way down the southwest
coast of the great Island Province, past shores still basking in the
amethystine light of Indian summer, through seas so teeming with fish
that they began to grow lazy with fatness. Here the Pup and other
younger members of the company felt inclined to stay. But their elders
knew that winter, with the long cold, and the scanty sun, and the
perilous grinding of tortured ice-floes around the shore-rocks, would
soon be upon them; so the journey was continued. On they pressed,
across the wide gateway of the Gulf, from Cape Ray to North Cape, the
eastern point of Nova Scotia. Good weather still waited upon their
wayfaring, and they loitered onward gayly, till, arriving at the
myriad-islanded bay of the Tuskets, near the westernmost tip of the
peninsula, they could not, for sheer satisfaction, go farther