And beaks snapped at him more menacingly as he went on, and gray shapes floated over his head, and now and then he heard the cries of dying things--the agonized squeak of a wood-mouse, the cry of a day-bird torn from its sleeping place by a sinuous, beady-eyed creature of fur and claw, the noisy screaming of a rabbit swooped upon and pierced to the vitals by one of the gray-feathered pirates of the air.

And then, squarely in the center of a great pool of moonlight, Peter came upon a monster.

It was a bear, a huge mother bear, with two butter-fat cubs wrestling and rolling in the moon glow.

Peter had never seen a bear.

But the mother, who raised her brown nose suddenly from the cool mold out of which she had been digging lily-bulbs, had seen dogs.