TEDDY BEAR'S BEE TREE They were exploring the high slopes of the farther shore of Silverwater.

It had been an unusually long trip for the Babe's short legs, and Uncle Andy had considerately called a halt, on the pretext that it was time for a smoke.

He knew that the Babe would trudge on till he dropped in his tracks before acknowledging that he was tired.
A mossy boulder under the ethereal green shade of a silver birch offered the kind of resting place--comfortable yet unkempt--which appealed to Uncle Andy's taste; and there below, over a succession of three low, wooded ridges, lay outspread the enchanting mirror of the lake.

Uncle Andy's pipe never tasted so good to him as when he could smoke it to the accompaniment of a wide and eye-filling view.
The Babe, who had squatted himself cross-legged on the turf at the foot of the boulder, would have appreciated that superb view also, but that his eager eyes had detected a pair of brown rabbits peering out at him inquiringly from the fringes of a thicket of young firs.
"Perhaps," he thought to himself, "if we keep very still indeed, they'll come out and play." He was about to whisper this suggestion cautiously to Uncle Andy, when, from somewhere in the trees behind them, came a loud sound of scrambling, of claws scratching on bark, followed by a thud, a grunt, and a whining, and then the crash of some heavy creature careering through the underbrush.

It paused within twenty or thirty paces of them in its noisy flight, but the bushes were so thick that they could not catch a glimpse of it.
The rabbits vanished.