CHAPTER VI

TEDDY BEAR’S BEE TREE

They were exploring the high slopes of the farther shore of Silverwater.  It had been an unusually long trip for the Babe’s short legs, and Uncle Andy had considerately called a halt, on the pretext that it was time for a smoke.  He knew that the Babe would trudge on till he dropped in his tracks before acknowledging that he was tired.  A mossy boulder under the ethereal green shade of a silver birch offered the kind of resting place—­comfortable yet unkempt—­which appealed to Uncle Andy’s taste; and there below, over a succession of three low, wooded ridges, lay outspread the enchanting mirror of the lake.  Uncle Andy’s pipe never tasted so good to him as when he could smoke it to the accompaniment of a wide and eye-filling view.

The Babe, who had squatted himself cross-legged on the turf at the foot of the boulder, would have appreciated that superb view also, but that 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.

“That’s just what I—­” began Uncle Andy.  But he was interrupted.

“Oh! Oh!  It’s stung me!” cried the Babe shrilly, jumping to his feet and slapping at his ear.  His eyes filled with injured tears.

Uncle Andy stared at him for a moment in grave reproof.  Then he, too, sprang up as if the boulder had suddenly grown red-hot, and pawed at his hair with both hands, dropping his pipe.

“Gee!  I see why he fell down!” he cried.  The Babe gave another cry, clapped his hand to his leg where the stocking did not quite join the short breeches, and began hopping up and down on one foot.  A heavy, pervasive hum was beginning to make itself heard.