The forest grew more open after a time, and this cheered him up a little.  Also the warmth of the sun was taking the ache out of his body.  But he grew hungrier and hungrier.  He always had depended entirely on Kazan and Gray Wolf for food.  His parents had, in some ways, made a great baby of him.  Gray Wolf’s blindness accounted for this, for since his birth she had not taken up her hunting with Kazan, and it was quite natural that Baree should stick close to her, though more than once he had been filled with a great yearning to follow his father.  Nature was hard at work trying to overcome its handicap now.  It was struggling to impress on Baree that the time had now come when he must seek his own food.  The fact impinged itself upon him slowly but steadily, and he began to think of the three or four shellfish he had caught and devoured on the stony creek bar near the windfall.  He also remembered the open clamshell he had found, and the lusciousness of the tender morsel inside it.  A new excitement began to possess him.  He became, all at once, a hunter.

With the thinning out of the forest the creek grew more shallow.  It ran again over bars of sand and stones, and Baree began to nose along the edge of the shallows.  For a long time he had no success.  The few crayfish that he saw were exceedingly lively and elusive, and all the clamshells were shut so tight that even Kazan’s powerful jaws would have had difficulty in smashing them.  It was almost noon when he caught his first crayfish, about as big as a man’s forefinger.  He devoured it ravenously.  The taste of food gave him fresh courage.  He caught two more crayfish during the afternoon.  It was almost dusk when he stirred a young rabbit out from under a cover of grass.  If he had been a month older, he could have caught it.  He was still very hungry, for three crayfish—­scattered through the day—­had not done much to fill the emptiness that was growing steadily in him.

With the approach of night Baree’s fears and great loneliness returned.  Before the day had quite gone he found soft bed of sand.  Since his fight with Papayuchisew, he had traveled a long distance, and the rock under which he made his bed this night was at least eight or nine miles from the windfall.  It was in the open of the creek bottom, with and when the moon rose, and the stars filled the sky, Baree could look out and see the water of the stream shimmering in a glow almost as bright as day.  Directly in front of him, running to the water’s edge, was a broad carpet of white sand.  Across this sand, half an hour later, came a huge black bear.