his eager eyes had detected a pair of brown rabbits peering out at him
inquiringly from the fringes of a thicket of young firs.

"Perhaps," he thought to himself, "if we keep very still indeed,
they'll come out and play."

He was about to whisper this suggestion cautiously to Uncle Andy, when,
from somewhere in the trees behind them, came a loud sound of
scrambling, of claws scratching on bark, followed by a thud, a grunt,
and a whining, and then the crash of some heavy creature careering
through the underbrush. It paused within twenty or thirty paces of
them in its noisy flight, but the bushes were so thick that they could
not catch a glimpse of it.

The rabbits vanished. The Babe, startled, shrank closer to his uncle's
knee, and stared up at him with round eyes of inquiry.

"He's in a hurry, all right, and doesn't care who knows it!" chuckled
Uncle Andy. But his shaggy brows were knit in some perplexity.

"Who's _he_?" demanded the Babe.

"Well, now," protested Uncle Andy, as much as to say that the Babe
ought to have known that without asking, "you know there's nothing in
these woods big enough to make such a noise as that except a bear or a
moose. And a moose can't go up a tree. You heard that fellow fall
down out of a tree, didn't you?"

"Why did he fall down out of the tree?" asked the Babe, in a tone of
great surprise.