It is always annoying to be disturbed in the midst of one’s breakfast,—the more so if one has just had a painful scrimmage with a great barred owl whose nest one was trying to rob.

It is therefore not surprising that Bobby Lynx looked murderously about him from the limb to which he had leaped at the sound of the splash.

It must have been a large animal, he reasoned, to make so much noise; and Bob was after all but a kitten, whose life had thus far been one long adventure from the day he had had it out with Unk Wunk, the porcupine, to his recent falling out with the angry owl.

Someone, he felt sure, meant to rob him of his trout, and, unfortunately, in his surprise he had left it on the boulder beside the River.

The trouble with Bob, and, indeed, the entire Lynx family, was that, although they are so strong and their claws and teeth so sharp, their eyes are little good to them. In the woods, where nearly every creature is colored like the tree trunks, they cannot see anything unless it moves.

Otherwise it would be too easy for a lynx to make his kill, and the grouse and the hares and the toads and the meadow mice would have no chance at all in the game of life.

Not only were Bobby’s eyes not good, but his nose wasn’t half as keen as the noses of most wood-folks. He would walk right past a grouse hen without getting a smell of her.

That is why Bobby was always so alarmed when a sudden sound came from behind. He never knew what it might be until he saw the creature move.

This time he had not long to wait. A glossy form came ambling by, and Twinkly Eyes, the little Black Bear, sat down on his haunches not ten feet away, to devour his catch. For he, too, had been fishing, and the splash that had startled Bobby was the sound of his great paw slapping through the water at his trout.

Bobby watched craftily from under a canopy of leaves, his gray-brown body flattened along the limb. Then convinced that Twinkly Eyes had no design on his person, he began to wonder if the intruder would try to make off with his fish.

But the little Bear knew the law of the wilderness as well as any one. He knew that to steal another’s catch would mean a fight if the owner caught him. Though he could not see the hidden claimant of the half-eaten trout, his nose was keen enough to tell that another’s scent clung to the rock on which it lay, and he had no mind for calling that other’s wrath upon his head.

He was just slouching past, pretending he did not see it, in order to fish farther up the stream, when there was a snarl and a splutter, as Bobby leaped, spitting and clawing back to his fish.

Twinkly stared at the strange creature, his little black eyes showing red lights, as he squared himself for the scrap that he feared would follow.

What had he done, anyway, to call forth such an exhibition of bad temper, he asked crossly with a growl deep down in his throat.

Then, too, Twinkly Eyes had never seen a lynx before, and the unknown is always to be distrusted.