hing, scurrying, whining, and three cubs tumbled out of the dark
hole in the rocks, with fuzzy yellow fur and bright eyes and sharp ears
and noses, like collies, all blinking and wondering and suddenly silent
at the big bright world which they had never seen before, so different
from the dark den under the rocks.

Indeed it was a marvelous world that the little cubs looked upon when
they came out to blink and wonder in the June sunshine. Contrasts
everywhere, that made the world seem too big for one little glance to
comprehend it all. Here the sunlight streamed and danced and quivered on
the warm rocks; there deep purple cloud shadows rested for hours, as if
asleep, or swept over the mountain side in an endless game of
fox-and-geese with the sunbeams. Here the birds trilled, the bees hummed
in the bluebells, the brook roared and sang on its way to the sea; while
over all the harmony of the world brooded a silence too great to be
disturbed. Sunlight and shadow, snow and ice, gloomy ravines and
dazzling mountain tops, mayflowers and singing birds and rustling winds
filled all the earth with color and movement and melody. From under
their very feet great masses of rock, tossed and tumbled as by a giant's
play, stretched downwards to where the green woods began and rolled in
vast billows to the harbor, which shone and sparkled in the sun, yet
seemed no bigger than their mother's paw. Fishing-boats with shining
sails hovered over it, like dragon-flies, going and coming from the
little houses that sheltered together under the opposite mountain, like
a cluster of gray toadstools by a towering pine stump. Most wonderful,
most interesting of all was the little gray hut on the shore, almost
under their feet, where little Noel and the Indian children played with
the tide like fiddler crabs, or pushed bravely out to meet the fishermen
in a bobbing nutshell. For wolf cubs are like collies in this, that they
seem to have a natural interest, perhaps a natural kinship with man, and
next to their own kind nothing arouses their interest like a group of
children playing.

So the little cubs took their first glimpse of the big world, of
mountains and sea and sunshine, and children playing on the shore, and
the world was altogether too wonderful for little heads to comprehend.
Nevertheless one plain impression remained, the same that you see in the
ears and nose and stumbling feet and wagging tail of every puppy-dog you
meet on the streets