Next day when they were called out to play they saw a different and more gloomy landscape, a chaos of granite rocks, a forest of evergreen, the white plunge and rolling mist of a mountain torrent; but no silver sea with fishing-boats drifting over it, like clouds in the sea over their heads, and no gray hut with children running about like ants on the distant shore.  And as they played they began for the first time to imitate the old mother keeping guard over them, sitting up often to watch and listen and sift the winds, trying to understand what fear was, and why they had been taken away from the sunny hillside where the world was so much bigger and brighter than here.  But home is where mother is,—­that, fortunately, is also true of the little Wood Folk, who understand it in their own savage way for a season,—­and in their wonder at their new surroundings the memory of the old home gradually faded away.  They never knew with what endless care the new den had been chosen; how the mother, in the days when she knew she was watched, had searched it out and watched over it and put her nose to every ridge and ravine and brook-side, day after day, till she was sure that no foot save that of the wild things had touched the soil within miles of the place.  They felt only a greater wildness, a deeper solitude; and they never forgot, though they were unmolested, the strange feeling that was born in them on that first terrifying night journey in their mother’s jaws.

* * * * *

Soon the food that was brought home at dawn—­the rabbit or grouse, or the bunch of rats hanging by their tails, with which the mother supplemented their midday drink of milk—­became altogether too scant to satisfy their clamorous appetites; and in the bright afternoons and the long summer twilights the mother led them forth on short journeys to hunt for themselves.  No big caribou or cunning fox cub, as one might suppose, but “rats and mice and such small deer” were the limit of the mother’s ambition for her little ones.  They began on stupid grubs that one could find asleep under stones and roots, and then on beetles that scrambled away briskly at the first alarm, and then, when the sunshine was brightest, on grasshoppers,—­lively, wary fellows that zipped and buzzed away just when you were sure you had them, and that generally landed from an astounding jump facing in a different direction, like a flea, so as to be ready for your next move.

It was astonishing how quickly the cubs learned that game is not to be picked up tamely, like huckleberries, and changed their style of hunting,—­creeping, instead 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,