Nose vs. Ears
- As grumpy and gruff as the big bear may be, turns out he can put on just as good of a show as the rabbit.
- He wiggles that nose of his and sniffs and snuffs. He waggles that nose and whiffs and whuffs. And he does it not for seven minutes but for ten—one upping time-wise before he one ups feat-wise. The bear takes great pain to let the rabbit know he's smelled way beyond his pathetic little fly, right to a nest with a bird that seems a little shocked and invaded at being sniffed by a stranger from so far away.
- The illustrations do a hilarious job of emphasizing how great this feat is by reducing the size of our two braggarts to tiny specks while we sail across big mountains to a nest entirely out of view. For most of us, this kind of scale would make us feel small and insignificant in the face of nature's magnitude. But the Bear—it's just more for his ego.
- We can see this, too, in the way the bear blathers on about his accomplishments. He calls his nose "wonderfully strong," and shows off by proclaiming that an egg hundreds of miles away is a little bit stale.
- And he finishes off, of course, by rubbing it all in the rabbit's face. He just can't be beat, he says. Because he's not just a bear, he's THE bear.