True, they were on the other side of the river. And the wind was blowing in quite the wrong direction, so that Mother Black Bear’s nose could not warn her of his approach. Thus, if he kept on the way he was headed, he was due to stumble upon the little family very soon, and give both them and himself an unpleasant surprise. For Mother Black Bear was mighty touchy where her cubs were concerned. She was in a mood these days for clawing anyone who so much as looked at them, so precious were the two fat babies to her. The last red glow of the setting sun was glinting off the river between the shadows of the trees. And Mother Black Bear was catching fish. The two fat, roly-poly cubs, Twinkly’s baby sisters, sat on the bank and watched gravely, while their mother waded in up to her neck, paddling so carefully downstream that she scarcely made a ripple in the mirror that it made. A trout might well have taken her for a log floating gently with the current. Her arms she held well down to her sides with claws spread. Suddenly she felt a smooth form glide against her side! With one swift clutch of her curved iron claws she had her fish, and was flinging it ashore to the babies. The next fish she carried ashore in her jaws for her own supper. Then back she led the cubs up-stream to where the riffles glittered in the sunset red. Here, standing perfectly still in the shallow water, she waited till a trout came by, when with one sharp blow on the head she finished his career. Meantime, where was the Boy from the Valley Farm? Deciding at length that it was getting too dark to see foot-prints, he became aware that the cow-bell was again tinkling and remembered with a guilty pang that his father was probably waiting for the cows that minute. [Illustration: [Bear]] XXXIII TWINKLY AGAIN MEETS THE PORCUPINE Twinkly Eyes, the little Black Bear, cocked first one ear and then another. There was certainly a buzzing somewhere that sounded mighty like the sound that honey bees made. The memory of his feast at the bee tree made him lick his chops in delight. He followed the sound to the tree around which it centered, clambered up the trunk, and was soon following the particular limb on the end of which most of the “bees” were clustered. Twinkly, after all, had had but one experience with bees, and it is not surprising that these insects should have fooled him. True, he had not expected to find the honey out at the end of the branch inside a round gray ball. The time he had had that feast, the honey had been in a great mass of comb inside the hollow trunk. But then, one never could tell. His ears told him that there were bees, and he always trusted more to his ears than his eyes. But then, he trusted more to his nose than either of them,—at least generally.