It was not until he was in the boat, with the oars in his hands, that he gathered clearly what had happened.

Then, however, he bent to the oars with a will which convinced even that frantic and vehement mother that nothing better could be demanded of him.

Dodging logs and wrecks and uprooted trees, the boat went surging down the flood, while the woman sat stiffly erect in the stern, her face white as death, her eyes staring far ahead, while from time to time she muttered angry phrases which sounded as if the baby had gone off on a pleasure trip without leave and was going to be called to sharp account for it.
"The other mother had the deeper and more immediate cause for anguish.
Coming to the bank where she had left her cub in the tree, she found the bank caved in and the tree and cub together vanished.

Unlike the baby's mother, she _could_ swim; but she knew that she could run faster and farther.

In stoic silence, but with a look of piteous anxiety in her eyes, she started on a gallop down the half-drowned shores, clambering the heaps of debris, and swimming the deep, still estuaries where the flood had backed up into the valleys of the tributary brooks.
"At last, with laboring lungs and pounding heart, she came out upon a low, bare bluff overlooking the flood, and saw, not a hundred yards out, the raft with its two little passengers asleep.