to ignore the thickets where game was hiding plentifully and take her cubs to the dry, sunny plains on the edge of the caribou barrens.  There for hours at a time they hunted elusive grasshoppers, rushing helter-skelter over the dry moss, leaping up to strike at the flying game with their paws like a kitten, or snapping wildly to catch it in their mouths and coming down with a back-breaking wriggle to keep themselves from tumbling over on their heads.  Then on again, with a droll expression and noses sharpened like exclamation points, to find another grasshopper.

Small business indeed and often ludicrous, this playing at grasshopper hunting.  So it seems to us; so also, perhaps, to the wise old mother, which knew all the ways of game, from crickets to caribou and from ground sparrows to wild geese.  But play is the first great educator,—­that is as true of animals as of men,—­and to the cubs their rough helter-skelter after hoppers was as exciting as a stag hunt to the pack, as full of surprises as the wild chase through the soft snow after a litter of lynx kittens.  And though they knew it not, they were learning things every hour of the sunny, playful afternoons that they would remember and find useful all the days of their life.

So the funny little hunt went on, the mother watching gravely under a bush where she was inconspicuous, and the cubs, full of zest and inexperience, missing the flying tidbits more often than they swallowed them, until they learned at last to locate all game accurately before chasing or alarming it; and that is the rule, learned from hunting grasshoppers, which a wolf follows ever afterward.  Even after they knew just where the grasshopper was hiding, watching them after a jump, and leaped upon him swiftly from a distance, he often got away when they lifted their paws to eat him.  For the grasshopper was not dead under the light paw, as they supposed, but only pressed into the moss waiting for his chance to jump.  Then the cubs learned another lesson:  to hold their game down with both paws pressed closely together, inserting their noses like a wedge and keeping every crack of escape shut tight until they had the slippery morsel safe under their back teeth.  And even then it was deliciously funny to watch their expression as they chewed, opening their jaws wide as if swallowing a rabbit, snapping them shut again as the grasshopper wiggled; and always with a doubt in their close-set eyes, a questioning twist of head and ears, as if they were not quite sure whether or not they were really eating him.

Another suggestive thing came out in these hunts, which you must notice whether you watch wolves or coyotes or a den of fox cubs.  Though no sound came from the watchful old mother, the cubs seemed at every instant under absolute control.  One would rush away pell-mell after a hopper, miss him and tumble away again, till he was some distance from the busy group on the edge of the big lonely barren.