haw, such a blizzard came. In half an hour the pool
was frozen and a fine snow was drifting in fierce whirls about the cage.

The unhappy bear lifted his head and looked forth from his den. But he
was not going to let himself again be cheated. He had no faith in this
alien storm; and turning his back upon it, he once more buried his nose
between his paws.

Meanwhile the cold deepened swiftly; the wind grew savage and shrieked
over the cages and the roofs; and the snow, dry and hard like the driven
needles of the Arctic night, thickened so that one could not see ten
paces before his nose. Through the throbbing drift the attendants went
hurrying about the open cages, fixing shelter for the animals that
needed it. The cold, the savage noises of the wind, the sharp buffets of
snow that struck into his den, at last brought the bear to his feet. He
turned slowly, and came out into the storm.

He found himself, now, actually alone, and in what seemed almost his own
world. This storm was convincing. He could not refuse to believe in the
icy driven crystals which cut so deliciously upon his tongue and against
his open jaws. This was really snow, that whirled and heaped about him.
This was really ice, which crashed about him as he plunged in and out of
his pool. Around and around his cage he romped, biting the snow in
ecstasy, rolling in it, breathing it, whimpering to it. When his keeper
came and looked in at him with wonder, and spoke to him with
sympathetic comprehension, he neither saw nor heard. To his eyes the
storm was volleying over the illimitable fields of the ice. In his ears
the raving of the wind held the crash of grinding floes. To his heart it
was the summons of the north,--and suddenly his heart answered. He stood
still, with a strange bewilderment in his eyes, as if transfixed by some
kind of tremendous shock. Then he swayed on his legs; and sank in a
lifeless heap by the drifted brink of his pool.

The Last Barrier

I

In a circular hollow in the clean, bright gravel of the river-bar the
tiny egg of the great Quahdavic salmon stirred to life. For months it
had lain there among its thousands of fellows, with the clear, cold,
unsullied current streaming over it ceaselessly. Through the autumn the
wilderness sunshine and the bracing wilderness air, playing on the
unshaded shallows of the wide stream, had kept the water highly
vitalized,--though this was hardly necessary in that pure and spring-fed
cu