Twinkly Eyes, the little Black Bear, galloped across the pine needles as noiselessly as a shadow.

His drop from the tree-top had taken only a second, while the Boy had used up fully half a minute sliding down the trunk. So that, by the time the Boy began looking for footprints, the bear was away up stream in the top of another tree, peacefully licking up the ants from the bark.

Meantime the Boy from the Valley Farm was running into a danger of which he little dreamed.

Being a backwoods boy, he knew that a mother bear with cubs is a person to avoid. But he did not know that Mother Black Bear had brought her two new cubs to the very stream along which he was searching for footprints.

True, they were on the other side of the river. And the wind was blowing in quite the wrong direction, so that Mother Black Bear’s nose could not warn her of his approach. Thus, if he kept on the way he was headed, he was due to stumble upon the little family very soon, and give both them and himself an unpleasant surprise.

For Mother Black Bear was mighty touchy where her cubs were concerned. She was in a mood these days for clawing anyone who so much as looked at them, so precious were the two fat babies to her.

The last red glow of the setting sun was glinting off the river between the shadows of the trees. And Mother Black Bear was catching fish. The two fat, roly-poly cubs, Twinkly’s baby sisters, sat on the bank and watched gravely, while their mother waded in up to her neck, paddling so carefully downstream that she scarcely made a ripple in the mirror that it made. A trout might well have taken her for a log floating gently with the current.

Her arms she held well down to her sides with claws spread. Suddenly she felt a smooth form glide against her side! With one swift clutch of her curved iron claws she had her fish, and was flinging it ashore to the babies.

The next fish she carried ashore in her jaws for her own supper. Then back she led the cubs up-stream to where the riffles glittered in the sunset red. Here, standing perfectly still in the shallow water, she waited till a trout came by, when with one sharp blow on the head she finished his career.

Meantime, where was the Boy from the Valley Farm?

Deciding at length that it was getting too dark to see foot-prints, he became aware that the cow-bell was again tinkling and remembered with a guilty pang that his father was probably waiting for the cows that minute.