We went on through the trees toward the caves--an
excited and disorderly mob that drove before it to
their holes all the small life of the forest, and that
set the blue-jays screaming impudently. Now that there
was no immediate danger, Long-Lip waited for his
grand-father, Marrow-Bone; and with the gap of a
generation between them, the old fellow and the youth
brought up our rear.
And so it was that Lop-Ear became a bachelor once more.
That night I slept with him in the old cave, and our
old life of chumming began again. The loss of his mate
seemed to cause him no grief. At least he showed no
signs of it, nor of need for her. It was the wound in
his leg that seemed to bother him, and it was all of a
week before he got back again to his old spryness.
Marrow-Bone was the only old member in the horde.
Sometimes, on looking back upon him, when the vision of
him is most clear, I note a striking resemblance
between him and the father of my father's gardener.
The gardener's father was very old, very wrinkled and
withered; and for all the world, when he peered through
his tiny, bleary eyes and mumbled with his toothless
gums, he looked and acted like old Marrow-Bone.
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