That this world was not altogether so nice as it at first appeared he was very soon to learn.  At the darkening signs of an approaching storm one day Gray Wolf tried to lure him back under the windfall.  It was her first warning to Ba-ree and he did not understand.  Where Gray Wolf failed, nature came to teach a first lesson.  Ba-ree was caught in a sudden deluge of rain.  It flattened him out in pure terror and he was drenched and half drowned before Gray Wolf caught him between her jaws and carried him into shelter.  One by one after this the first strange experiences of life came to him, and one by one his instincts received their birth.  Greatest for him of the days to follow was that on which his inquisitive nose touched the raw flesh of a freshly killed and bleeding rabbit.  It was his first taste of blood.  It was sweet.  It filled him with a strange excitement and thereafter he knew what it meant when Kazan brought in something between his jaws.  He soon began to battle with sticks in place of the soft fur and his teeth grew as hard and as sharp as little needles.

The Great Mystery was bared to him at last when Kazan brought in between his jaws, a big rabbit that was still alive but so badly crushed that it could not run when dropped to the ground.  Ba-ree had learned to know what rabbits and partridges meant—­the sweet warm blood that he loved better even than he had ever loved his mother’s milk.  But they had come to him dead.  He had never seen one of the monsters alive.  And now the rabbit that Kazan dropped to the ground, kicking and struggling with a broken back, sent Ba-ree back appalled.  For a few moments he wonderingly watched the dying throes of Kazan’s prey.  Both Kazan and Gray Wolf seemed to understand that this was to be Ba-ree’s first lesson in his education as a slaying and flesh-eating creature, and they stood close over the rabbit, making no effort to end its struggles.  Half a dozen times Gray Wolf sniffed at the rabbit and then turned her blind face toward Ba-ree.  After the third or fourth time Kazan stretched himself out on his belly a few feet away and watched the proceedings attentively.  Each time that Gray Wolf lowered her head to muzzle the rabbit Ba-ree’s little ears shot up expectantly.  When he saw that nothing happened and that his mother was not hurt he came a little nearer.  Soon he could reach out, stiff-legged and cautious, and touch the furry thing that was not yet dead.

In a last spasmodic convulsion the big rabbit doubled up its rear legs and gave a kick that sent Ba-ree sprawling back, yelping in terror.  He regained his feet and then, for the first time, anger and the desire to retaliate took possession of him.  The kick had completed his first education.  He came back with less caution, but stiffer-legged, and a moment later had dug his tiny teeth in the rabbit’s neck.  He could feel the throb of life in the soft body, the muscles of the dying rabbit twitched convulsively under him, and he hung with his teeth until there was no longer a tremor of life in his first kill.  Gray Wolf was delighted.  She caressed Ba-ree with her tongue, and even Kazan condescended to sniff approvingly of his son when he returned to the rabbit.  And never before had warm sweet blood tasted so good to Ba-ree as it did to-day.