For two or three days Baree’s excursions after food took him farther and farther away from the pond.  But each afternoon he returned to it—­until the third day, when he discovered a new creek, and Wakayoo.  The creek was fully two miles back in the forest.  This was a different sort of stream.  It sang merrily over a gravelly bed and between chasm walls of split rock.  It formed deep pools and foaming eddies, and where Baree first struck it, the air trembled with the distant thunder of a waterfall.  It was much pleasanter than the dark and silent beaver stream.  It seemed possessed of life, and the rush and tumult of it—­the song and thunder of the water—­gave to Baree entirely new sensations.  He made his way along it slowly and cautiously, and it was because of this slowness and caution that he came suddenly and unobserved upon Wakayoo, the big black bear, hard at work fishing.

Wakayoo stood knee-deep in a pool that had formed behind a sand bar, and he was having tremendously good luck.  Even as Baree shrank back, his eyes popping at sight of this monster he had seen but once before, in the gloom of night, one of Wakayoo’s big paws sent a great splash of water high in the air, and a fish landed on the pebbly shore.  A little while before, the suckers had run up the creek in thousands to spawn, and the rapid lowering of the water had caught many of them in these prison pools.  Wakayoo’s fat, sleek body was evidence of the prosperity this circumstance had brought him.  Although it was a little past the “prime” season for bearskins, Wakayoo’s coat was splendidly thick and black.

For a quarter of an hour Baree watched him while he knocked fish out of the pool.  When at last he stopped, there were twenty or thirty fish among the stones, some of them dead and others still flopping.  From where he lay flattened out between two rocks, Baree could hear the crunching of flesh and bone as the bear devoured his dinner.  It sounded good, and the fresh smell of fish filled him with a craving that had never been roused by crayfish or even partridge.

In spite of his fat and his size, Wakayoo was not a glutton, and after he had eaten his fourth fish he pawed all the others together in a pile, partly covered them by raking up sand and stones with his long claws, and finished his work of caching by breaking down a small balsam sapling so that the fish were entirely concealed.  Then he lumbered slowly away in the direction of the rumbling waterfall.

Twenty seconds after the last of Wakayoo had disappeared in a turn of the creek, Baree was under the broken balsam.  He dragged out a fish that was still alive.  He ate the whole of it, and it tasted delicious.

Baree now found that Wakayoo had solved the food problem for him, and this day he did not return to the beaver pond, nor the next.  The big bear was incessantly fishing up and down the creek, and day after day Baree continued his feasts.  It was not difficult for him to find Wakayoo’s caches.  All he had to do was to follow along the shore of the stream, sniffing carefully.  Some of the caches were getting old, and their perfume was anything but pleasant to Baree.  These he avoided—­but he never missed a meal or two out of a fresh one.