Yes, sir, Twinkly Eyes awoke to find it snowing!

A more surprised young bear you never saw in all your life, for as yet he had found no cave in which to pass his winter’s sleep. And the winds that tore around Mount Olaf made goose-flesh underneath his furs.

He stared about him dazedly. Great soft flakes as big as feathers were falling, falling, falling through the naked tree-tops. He had never heard the world so still. And off across the valley the air looked thick and gray like a blanket.

And indeed, it was a blanket—was this whirling white stuff that kept covering over the dead leaves that carpeted the forest floor. It filled in all the niches, and shut out all the wind.

It was a blanket for next year’s flowers, and for little young trees and shrubs too tender yet to meet the winter’s cold.

It was a blanket for the field mice and the white-footed wood mice, in their homes under-ground or inside old hollow stumps. It would be a sheltering blanket for Fatty Chuck in his cave under the barn-yard fence, down at the Valley Farm. For it would sift down into his entrance hole and over the earth above until frost could not reach him curled up in a ball there sound asleep.

But all this did not help Twinkly Eyes, staring at the falling flakes while he longed with his whole soul for sleep. If in all his rambles over the mountainside he had not found even a crevice in the rocks in which he might den up for the winter, was it likely that further search would reveal one? He yawned, for he was oh, so dreadfully sleepy! He longed to curl up right where he was—but he knew if he did, he’d never wake. He’d just freeze solid, and that would be the end of him!

His last meal of dried bark and pine needles,—the meal that was to keep his stomach from feeling empty until spring, just because it wouldn’t digest,—sat heavy within him now, and he longed to begin his hi-ber-na-tion.

Animals that hibernate, you know, sleep away the cold months when food is hard to find. And when they wake up in the spring, they look very different from the fat creatures they were in the fall. They are then as thin as they were plump before.

But of course, with the season of plenty, they soon make up all they have lost. Meantime, they have kept safe and warm all through the bitter winter. For they first close up the entrance to their dens with leaves and mosses, and then curl up into warm furry balls, with their toes and their noses inside. Then the snow falls so deep that it keeps the high winds from finding their way to the sleepers, and there is nothing to disturb their dreams.

Fatty Chuck hibernates, too. But Fatty had gone into winter quarters long before, and was now snoozing away as snug and comfy as anything you can imagine.

If only the winter had been as easy a problem for Twinkly Eyes! What was he to do?