Not yet, Tus-ka-sah pragmatically averred. There would be fine weather
yet.

For the snowfall so early in the season was phenomenal and the red
leaves were still clinging to the trees.

Had they been together among men Amoyah would not have cared enough for
the subject to justify contention, but in the presence of women he would
suffer no contradiction. He must needs be paramount,--the infinitely
admired! He shook his head.

The winter had surely come, he insisted. Why, he argued, the bears
knew,--they always knew! And already each had walked the round with his
shadow.

For in the approach of winter, in the light of the first mystic, icicled
moon, the night when it reaches its full, a grotesque pageant is afoot
in that remote town of the bears, immemorially fabled to be hidden in
the dense coverts of the Great Smoky Mountains,--the procession of the
bears, each walking with his shadow, seven times around the illuminated
spaces of the "beloved square."

The bears knew undoubtedly, the "second man," the man of facts and
method and management, soberly admitted. But how did Amoyah know that
already they had trodden those significant circles, each with his
shadow? He smiled triumphant in his incontrovertible logic.

And now Amoyah's face was wonderful to view, whether as a fish on one
side or a woodpecker on the other, with that most human expression of
surprise and indignation and aversion as distinctly limned upon it as if