not found comradeship. And his heart was very sad.



CHAPTER 7

For two or three days Baree's excursions after food took him farther
and farther away from the pond. But each afternoon he returned to
it--until the third day, when he discovered a new creek, and Wakayoo.
The creek was fully two miles back in the forest. This was a different
sort of stream. It sang merrily over a gravelly bed and between chasm
walls of split rock. It formed deep pools and foaming eddies, and where
Baree first struck it, the air trembled with the distant thunder of a
waterfall. It was much pleasanter than the dark and silent beaver
stream. It seemed possessed of life, and the rush and tumult of it--the
song and thunder of the water--gave to Baree entirely new sensations.
He made his way along it slowly and cautiously, and it was because of
this slowness and caution that he came suddenly and unobserved upon
Wakayoo, the big black bear, hard at work fishing.

Wakayoo stood knee-deep in a pool that had formed behind a sand bar,
and he was having tremendously good luck. Even as Baree shrank back,
his eyes popping at sight of this monster he had seen but once before,
in the gloom of night, one of Wakayoo's big paws sent a great splash of
water high in the air, and a fish landed on the pebbly shore. A little
while before, the suckers had run up the creek in thousands to spawn,
and the rapid lowering of the water had caught many of them in these
prison pools. Wakayoo's fat, sleek body was evidence of the prosperity
this circumstance had brought him. Although it was a little past the
"prime" season for bearskins, Wakayoo's coat was splendidly thick and