ut of the way quicker than a wink
when one turned on them. What was the use of hanging around where there
were wolves, on a beautiful night like this? He lumbered on decisively.
Baree could hear him splashing heavily through the water of the creek.
Not until then did the wolf dog draw a full breath. It was almost a
gasp.

But the excitement was not over for the night. Baree had chosen his bed
at a place where the animals came down to drink, and where they crossed
from one of the creek forests to the other. Not long after the bear had
disappeared he heard a heavy crunching in the sand, and hoofs rattling
against stones, and a bull moose with a huge sweep of antlers passed
through the open space in the moonlight. Baree stared with popping
eyes, for if Wakayoo had weighed six hundred pounds, this gigantic
creature whose legs were so long that it seemed to be walking on stilts
weighed at least twice as much. A cow moose followed, and then a calf.

The calf seemed all legs. It was too much for Baree, and he shoved
himself farther and farther back under the rock until he lay wedged in
like a sardine in a box. And there he lay until morning.

CHAPTER 4

When Baree ventured forth from under his rock at the beginning of the
next day, he was a much older puppy than when he met Papayuchisew, the
young owl, in his path near the old windfall. If experience can be made
to take the place of age, he had aged a great deal in the last
forty-eight hours. In fact, he had passed almost out of puppyhood. He
awoke with a new and much broader conception of the world. It was a big
place. It was filled with many things, of which Kazan and Gray Wolf
were not the most important. The monsters he had seen on the moonlit
plot of sand had roused in him a new kind of caution, and the one
greatest instinct of beasts--the primal understanding that it is the
strong that prey upon the weak--was wakening swiftly in him. As yet he
quite naturally measured brute force and the menace of things by size
alone. Thus the bear was more terrible than Kazan, and the moose was
more terrible than the bear.

It was quite fortunate for Baree that this instinct did not go to the
limit in the beginning and make him understand that his own breed--the
wolf--was most feared of all the creatures, claw, hoof, and wing, of
the forests. Otherwise, like the small boy who thinks he can swim
before he has mastered a stroke, he might somewhere have jumped in
beyond his dept