The bear, to be sure, at five months old, was more grown up, more self-sufficing and efficient than the baby at five years; but he had the disadvantage of feeling himself an interloper.
He had come to the raft quite uninvited, and found the baby in possession! On that account, of course, he rather expected the baby to show her white little teeth, and snarl at him, and try to drive him off into the water.

In that case he would have resisted desperately, because he was in mortal fear of the boiling, seething flood.

But he was very uneasy, and kept up a whimpering that was intended to be conciliatory; for though the baby was small, and by no means ferocious, he regarded her as the possessor of the raft, and it was an axiom of the wilds that very small and harmless-looking creatures might become dangerous when resisting an invasion of their rights.
"The baby, on the other hand, was momentarily expecting that the bear would come over and bite her.

Why else, if not from some such sinister motive, had he come aboard her raft, when he had been traveling on a perfectly good tree?
The tree looked so much more interesting than her bare raft, on which she had been voyaging for over an hour, and of which she was now heartily tired.

To be sure, the bear was not much bigger than her own Teddy Bear at home, which she was wont to carry around by one leg, or to spank without ceremony whenever she thought it needed discipline.