“A hunter from the city came that way.  He had a good eye, a repeating rifle, and no imagination whatever.  With the luck that sometimes comes to those fellows, he was sitting under a tree near the bank, staring across at the otter-slide (which did not mean anything whatever or suggest anything to him, but was merely a strip of bare clay), when the otter family came to slide.  The father started down.  It was most interesting—­so the stranger under the tree, who was as spry as a sparrowhawk, shot instantly; and the otter came down in a crumpled heap.  The mother might have escaped; but for just one second she hesitated, glancing round to see if her little ones were out of danger.  That second was enough for the smart shot across the water.  She dropped.  It was good shooting, of course.  The two little ones, horrified by the spiteful noise, and quite unable to understand what had happened, shrank away into some thick bushes and lay very still, waiting for their mother to come and tell them the danger was past.”

“And she could never come!” murmured the Babe thoughtfully.

“Well, she didn’t,” snorted Uncle Andy, the discourager of sentiment.  Fairly reeking with sentiment himself, at heart, he disliked all manifestation of it in himself or others.  He liked it left to the imagination.  “They never stirred for an hour or more,” he went on.  “Then at last they stole out and began looking everywhere for those lost parents.  All about the slide they hunted—­among the bushes at the top, in the water and the rushes at the bottom—­but they found nothing.  For the man had come in his canoe and carried off his victims.

“All day long the two Little Furry Ones continued their search.  But you would not have known them for the same creatures as those which had started out that morning.  Then they had played carelessly and gone boldly, thinking not of enemies and fearing none.  Now they crept noiselessly, sniffing this way and that, and never showing their noses outside a thicket without first taking observations.  For life was now a very different matter with them.  Never in all their lives before had they come across so many hostile and threatening smells as they encountered this one afternoon.  But then, to be sure, they had never looked for them before.  They were all the time running into trails of mink, or weasel, or wildcat; and it seemed to them as if the world had suddenly become quite full of foxes.  They were painfully surprised, for they had never thought there were so many disagreeable creatures in the world.  You see, being so young and inexperienced, it never occurred to them that one fox or one weasel could make quite a lot of trails.  So they kept having palpitations every other minute.