stead of trotting openly so that even a porcupine
must notice them, hiding behind rocks and bushes and tufts of grass till
the precise moment came, and then leaping with the swoop of a goshawk on
a ptarmigan. A wolf that cannot catch a grasshopper has no business
hunting rabbits--this seemed to be the unconscious motive that led the
old mother, every sunny afternoon, to ignore the thickets where game was
hiding plentifully and take her cubs to the dry, sunny plains on the
edge of the caribou barrens. There for hours at a time they hunted
elusive grasshoppers, rushing helter-skelter over the dry moss, leaping
up to strike at the flying game with their paws like a kitten, or
snapping wildly to catch it in their mouths and coming down with a
back-breaking wriggle to keep themselves from tumbling over on their
heads. Then on again, with a droll expression and noses sharpened like
exclamation points, to find another grasshopper.

Small business indeed and often ludicrous, this playing at grasshopper
hunting. So it seems to us; so also, perhaps, to the wise old mother,
which knew all the ways of game, from crickets to caribou and from
ground sparrows to wild geese. But play is the first great
educator,--that is as true of animals as of men,--and to the cubs their
rough helter-skelter after hoppers was as exciting as a stag hunt to the
pack, as full of surprises as the wild chase through the soft snow after
a litter of lynx kittens. And though they knew it not, they were
learning things every hour of the sunny, playful afternoons that they
would remember and find useful all the days of their life.

So the funny little hunt went on, the mother watching gravely under a
bush where she was inconspicuous, and the cubs, full of zest and
inexperience, missing the flying tidbits more often than they swallowed
them, until they learned at last to locate all game accurately before
chasing or alarming it; and that is the rule, learned from hunting
grasshoppers, which a wolf follows ever afterward. Even after they knew
just where the grasshopper was hiding, watching them after a jump, and
leaped upon him swiftly from a distance, he often got away when they
lifted their paws to eat him. For the grasshopper was not dead under the
light paw, as they supposed, but only pressed into the moss waiting for
his chance to jump. Then the cubs learned another lesson: to hold their
game down with both paws pressed closely together, inserting their nose