The Babe was so surprised that he let go of his leg for a moment.

"Why?" he exclaimed, "how could a cub do what a big, strong, grown-up
bear couldn't manage?" He thought with a shudder how unequal _he_
would be to such an undertaking.

"You just wait and see!" admonished Uncle Andy, blowing furious clouds
from his monstrous cigarette. "It was about the end of the blue-berry
season when Teddy Bear lost his big, rusty-coated mother and small,
glossy black sister, and found himself completely alone in the world.
They had all three come down together from the high blue-berry patches
to the dark swamps to hunt for roots and fungi as a variation to their
fruit diet. The mother and sister had got caught together in a
deadfall--a dreadful trap which crushed them both flat in an instant.
Teddy Bear, some ten feet out of danger, had stared for two seconds in
frozen horror, and then raced away like mad with his mother's warning
screech hoarse in his ears. He knew by instinct that he would never
see the victims any more; and he was very unhappy and lonely. For a
whole day he moped, roaming restlessly about the high slopes and
refusing to eat, till at last he got so hungry that he just _had_ to
eat. Then he began to forget his grief a little, and devoted himself
to the business of finding a living. But from being the most
sunny-tempered of cubs he became all at once as peppery as could be.

"As I have told you," continued Uncle Andy, peering at him with strange
solemnity over the mud patch beneath his swollen eye, "the blue-berries
were just about done. And as Teddy would not go down to the lower
lands again to hunt for other kinds of rations, he had to do a lot of
hustling to find enough blue-berries for his healthy young appetite.
Thus it came about that when one day, on an out-of-the-way corner of