next day, he was a much older puppy than when he met Papayuchisew, the
young owl, in his path near the old windfall. If experience can be made
to take the place of age, he had aged a great deal in the last
forty-eight hours. In fact, he had passed almost out of puppyhood. He
awoke with a new and much broader conception of the world. It was a big
place. It was filled with many things, of which Kazan and Gray Wolf
were not the most important. The monsters he had seen on the moonlit
plot of sand had roused in him a new kind of caution, and the one
greatest instinct of beasts--the primal understanding that it is the
strong that prey upon the weak--was wakening swiftly in him. As yet he
quite naturally measured brute force and the menace of things by size
alone. Thus the bear was more terrible than Kazan, and the moose was
more terrible than the bear.

It was quite fortunate for Baree that this instinct did not go to the
limit in the beginning and make him understand that his own breed--the
wolf--was most feared of all the creatures, claw, hoof, and wing, of
the forests. Otherwise, like the small boy who thinks he can swim
before he has mastered a stroke, he might somewhere have jumped in
beyond his depth and had his head chewed off.

Very much alert, with the hair standing up along his spine, and a
little growl in his throat, Baree smelled of the big footprints made by
the bear and the moose. It was the bear scent that made him growl. He
followed the tracks to the edge of the creek. After that he resumed his
wandering, and also his hunt for food.

For two hours he did not find a crayfish. Then he came out of the green
timber into the edge of a burned-over country. Here everything was
black. The stumps of the trees stood up like huge charred canes. It was