about the whole affair except for one thing. She remembered to be
terribly afraid of bears--and that fear is indeed the beginning of
wisdom, as far as all the children of the wild are concerned. She
would start and tremble at sight of any particularly dense and bulky
shadow, and to come unexpectedly upon a big black stump was for some
weeks a painful experience. But the second step in wisdom--the value
of silence--she was very slow to learn. If her new mother got out of
her sight for half a minute she would begin bawling after her in a way
that must have been a great trial to the nerves of a reticent,
noiseless moose cow. The latter, moreover, could never get over the
idea that to cause all that noise some dreadful danger must be
threatening. She would come charging back on the run, her mane stiff
on her back and her eyes glaring, and she would hunt every thicket in
the neighborhood before she could feel quite reassured. Meanwhile, the
calf would look with wonder in her big, velvet-soft eyes, with probably
no slightest notion in her silly head as to what was making her new
mother so excited."

"How inconvenient that they couldn't talk," exclaimed the Child, who
had great faith in the virtue of explanations.

Uncle Andy rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"I suppose," he said, after a pause, "that the wild creatures _do_ talk
among themselves, more or less and after a fashion. But, you see, such
simple speech as the calf possessed was only what she had inherited,
and that, of course, was cow language and naturally unintelligible to a
moose. However, babies learn easily, and it was not long before she
and her new mother understood each other pretty well on most points of
importance.