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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Nomads Of The North, by James Oliver Curwood
+#7 in our series by James Oliver Curwood
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+Title: Nomads Of The North
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+Author: James Oliver Curwood
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+Release Date: December, 2003 [Etext #4704]
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+NOMADS OF THE NORTH
+
+A STORY OF ROMANCE AND ADVENTURE UNDER THE OPEN STARS
+
+BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+
+It was late in the month of March, at the dying-out of the Eagle
+Moon, that Neewa the black bear cub got his first real look at the
+world. Noozak, his mother, was an old bear, and like an old person
+she was filled with rheumatics and the desire to sleep late. So
+instead of taking a short and ordinary nap of three months this
+particular winter of little Neewa's birth she slept four, which,
+made Neewa, who was born while ms mother was sound asleep, a
+little over two months old instead of six weeks when they came out
+of den.
+
+In choosing this den Noozak had gone to a cavern at the crest of a
+high, barren ridge, and from this point Neewa first looked down
+into the valley. For a time, coming out of darkness into sunlight,
+he was blinded. He could hear and smell and feel many things
+before he could see. And Noozak, as though puzzled at finding
+warmth and sunshine in place of cold and darkness, stood for many
+minutes sniffing the wind and looking down upon her domain.
+
+For two weeks an early spring had been working its miracle of
+change in that wonderful country of the northland between
+Jackson's Knee and the Shamattawa River, and from north to south
+between God's Lake and the Churchill.
+
+It was a splendid world. From the tall pinnacle of rock on which
+they stood it looked like a great sea of sunlight, with only here
+and there patches of white snow where the winter winds had piled
+it deep. Their ridge rose up out of a great valley. On all sides
+of them, as far as a man's eye could have reached, there were blue
+and black patches of forest, the shimmer of lakes still partly
+frozen, the sunlit sparkle of rivulet and stream, and the greening
+open spaces out of which rose the perfumes of the earth. These
+smells drifted up like tonic and food to the nostrils of Noozak
+the big bear. Down there the earth was already swelling with life.
+The buds on the poplars were growing fat and near the bursting
+point; the grasses were sending out shoots tender and sweet; the
+camas were filling with juice; the shooting stars, the dog-tooth
+violets, and the spring beauties were thrusting themselves up into
+the warm glow of the sun, inviting Noozak and Neewa to the feast.
+All these things Noozak smelled with the experience and the
+knowledge of twenty years of life behind her--the delicious aroma
+of the spruce and the jackpine; the dank, sweet scent of water-
+lily roots and swelling bulbs that came from a thawed-out fen at
+the foot of the ridge; and over all these things, overwhelming
+their individual sweetnesses in a still greater thrill of life,
+the smell of the heart itself!
+
+And Neewa smelled them. His amazed little body trembled and
+thrilled for the first time with the excitement of life. A moment
+before in darkness, he found himself now in a wonderland of which
+he had never so much as had a dream. In these few minutes Nature
+was at work upon him. He possessed no knowledge, but instinct was
+born within him. He knew this was HIS world, that the sun and the
+warmth were for him, and that the sweet things of the earth were
+inviting him into his heritage. He puckered up his little brown
+nose and sniffed the air, and the pungency of everything that was
+sweet and to be yearned for came to him.
+
+And he listened. His pointed ears were pricked forward, and up to
+him came the drone of a wakening earth. Even the roots of the
+grasses must have been singing in their joy, for all through that
+sunlit valley there was the low and murmuring music of a country
+that was at peace because it was empty of men. Everywhere was the
+rippling sound of running water, and he heard strange sounds that
+he knew was life; the twittering of a rock-sparrow, the silver-
+toned aria of a black-throated thrush down in the fen, the shrill
+paean of a gorgeously coloured Canada jay exploring for a nesting
+place in a brake of velvety balsam. And then, far over his head, a
+screaming cry that made him shiver. It was instinct again that
+told him in that cry was danger. Noozak looked up, and saw the
+shadow of Upisk, the great eagle, as it flung itself between the
+sun and the earth. Neewa saw the shadow, and cringed nearer to his
+mother.
+
+And Noozak--so old that she had lost half her teeth, so old that
+her bones ached on damp and chilly nights, and her eyesight was
+growing dim--was still not so old that she did not look down with
+growing exultation upon what she saw. Her mind was travelling
+beyond the mere valley in which they had wakened. Off there beyond
+the walls of forest, beyond the farthest lake, beyond the river
+and the plain, were the illimitable spaces which gave her home. To
+her came dully a sound uncaught by Neewa--the almost
+unintelligible rumble of the great waterfall. It was this, and the
+murmur of a thousand trickles of running water, and the soft wind
+breathing down in the balsam and spruce that put the music of
+spring into the air.
+
+At last Noozak heaved a great breath out of her lungs and with a
+grunt to Neewa began to lead the way slowly down among the rocks
+to the foot of the ridge.
+
+In the golden pool of the valley it was even warmer than on the
+crest of the ridge. Noozak went straight to the edge of the
+slough. Half a dozen rice birds rose with a whir of wings that
+made Neewa almost upset himself. Noozak paid no attention to them.
+A loon let out a squawky protest at Noozak's soft-footed
+appearance, and followed it up with a raucous screech that raised
+the hair on Neewa's spine. And Noozak paid no attention to this.
+Neewa observed these things. His eye was on her, and instinct had
+already winged his legs with the readiness to run if his mother
+should give the signal. In his funny little head it was developing
+very quickly that his mother was a most wonderful creature. She
+was by all odds the biggest thing alive--that is, the biggest that
+stood on legs, and moved. He was confident of this for a space of
+perhaps two minutes, when they came to the end of the fen. And
+here was a sudden snort, a crashing of bracken, the floundering of
+a huge body through knee-deep mud, and a monstrous bull moose,
+four times as big as Noozak, set off in lively flight. Neewa's
+eyes all but popped from his head. And STILL Noozak PAID NO
+ATTENTION!
+
+It was then that Neewa crinkled up his tiny nose and snarled, just
+as he had snarled at Noozak's ears and hair and at sticks he had
+worried in the black cavern. A glorious understanding dawned upon
+him. He could snarl at anything he wanted to snarl at, no matter
+how big. For everything ran away from Noozak his mother.
+
+All through this first glorious day Neewa was discovering things,
+and with each hour it was more and more impressed upon him that
+his mother was the unchallenged mistress of all this new and
+sunlit domain.
+
+Noozak was a thoughtful old mother of a bear who had reared
+fifteen or eighteen families in her time, and she travelled very
+little this first day in order that Neewa's tender feet might
+toughen up a bit. They scarcely left the fen, except to go into a
+nearby clump of trees where Noozak used her claws to shred a
+spruce that they might get at the juice and slimy substance just
+under the bark. Neewa liked this dessert after their feast of
+roots and bulbs, and tried to claw open a tree on his own account.
+By mid-afternoon Noozak had eaten until her sides bulged out, and
+Neewa himself--between his mother's milk and the many odds and
+ends of other things--looked like an over-filled pod. Selecting a
+spot where the declining sun made a warm oven of a great white
+rock, lazy old Noozak lay down for a nap, while Neewa, wandering
+about in quest of an adventure of his own, came face to face with
+a ferocious bug.
+
+The creature was a giant wood-beetle two inches long. Its two
+battling pincers were jet black, and curved like hooks of iron. It
+was a rich brown in colour and in the sunlight its metallic armour
+shone in a dazzling splendour. Neewa, squatted flat on his belly,
+eyed it with a swiftly beating heart. The beetle was not more than
+a foot away, and ADVANCING! That was the curious and rather
+shocking part of it. It was the first living thing he had met with
+that day that had not run away. As it advanced slowly on its two
+rows of legs the beetle made a clicking sound that Neewa heard
+quite distinctly. With the fighting blood of his father,
+Soominitik, nerving him on to the adventure he thrust out a
+hesitating paw, and instantly Chegawasse, the beetle, took upon
+himself a most ferocious aspect. His wings began humming like a
+buzz-saw, his pincers opened until they could have taken in a
+man's finger, and he vibrated on his legs until it looked as
+though he might be performing some sort of a dance. Neewa jerked
+his paw back and after a moment or two Chegawasse calmed himself
+and again began to ADVANCE!
+
+Neewa did not know, of course, that the beetle's field of vision
+ended about four inches from the end of his nose; the situation,
+consequently, was appalling. But it was never born in a son of a
+father like Soominitik to run from a bug, even at nine weeks of
+age. Desperately he thrust out his paw again, and unfortunately
+for him one of his tiny claws got a half Nelson on the beetle and
+held Chegawasse on his shining back so that he could neither buzz
+not click. A great exultation swept through Neewa. Inch by inch he
+drew his paw in until the beetle was within reach of his sharp
+little teeth. Then he smelled of him.
+
+That was Chegawasse's opportunity. The pincers closed and Noozak's
+slumbers were disturbed by a sudden bawl of agony. When she raised
+her head Neewa was rolling about as if in a fit. He was scratching
+and snarling and spitting. Noozak eyed him speculatively for some
+moments, then reared herself slowly and went to him. With one big
+paw she rolled him over--and saw Chegawasse firmly and
+determinedly attached to her offspring's nose. Flattening Neewa on
+his back so that he could not move she seized the beetle between
+her teeth, bit slowly until Chegawasse lost his hold, and then
+swallowed him.
+
+From then until dusk Neewa nursed his sore nose. A little before
+dark Noozak curled herself up against the big rock, and Neewa took
+his supper. Then he made himself a nest in the crook of her big,
+warm forearm. In spite of his smarting nose he was a happy bear,
+and at the end of his first day he felt very brave and very
+fearless, though he was but nine weeks old. He had come into the
+world, he had looked upon many things, and if he had not conquered
+he at least had gone gloriously through the day.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+
+That night Neewa had a hard attack of Mistu-puyew, or stomach-
+ache. Imagine a nursing baby going direct from its mother's breast
+to a beefsteak! That was what Neewa had done. Ordinarily he would
+not have begun nibbling at solid foods for at least another month,
+but nature seemed deliberately at work in a process of intensive
+education preparing him for the mighty and unequal struggle which
+he would have to put up a little later. For hours Neewa moaned and
+wailed, and Noozak muzzled his bulging little belly with her nose,
+until finally he vomited and was better.
+
+After that he slept. When he awoke he was startled by opening his
+eyes full into the glare of a great blaze of fire. Yesterday he
+had seen the sun, golden and shimmering and far away. But this was
+the first time he had seen it come up over the edge of the world
+on a spring morning in the Northland. It was as red as blood, and
+as he stared it rose steadily and swiftly until the flat side of
+it rounded out and it was a huge ball of SOMETHING. At first he
+thought it was Life--some monstrous creature sailing up over the
+forest toward them--and he turned with a whine of enquiry to his
+mother. Whatever it was, Noozak was unafraid. Her big head was
+turned toward it, and she was blinking her eyes in solemn comfort.
+It was then that Neewa began to feel the pleasing warmth of the
+red thing, and in spite of his nervousness he began to purr in the
+glow of it. From red the sun turned swiftly to gold, and the whole
+valley was transformed once more into a warm and pulsating glory
+of life.
+
+For two weeks after this first sunrise in Neewa's life Noozak
+remained near the ridge and the slough. Then came the day, when
+Neewa was eleven weeks old, that she turned her nose toward the
+distant black forests and began the summer's peregrination.
+Neewa's feet had lost their tenderness, and he weighed a good six
+pounds. This was pretty good considering that he had only weighed
+twelve ounces at birth.
+
+From the day when Noozak set off on her wandering TREK Neewa's
+real adventures began. In the dark and mysterious caverns of the
+forests there were places where the snow still lay unsoftened by
+the sun, and for two days Neewa yearned and whined for the sunlit
+valley. They passed the waterfall, where Neewa looked for the
+first tune on a rushing torrent of water. Deeper and darker and
+gloomier grew the forest Noozak was penetrating. In this forest
+Neewa received his first lessons in hunting. Noozak was now well
+in the "bottoms" between the Jackson's Knee and Shamattawa
+waterway divides, a great hunting ground for bears in the early
+spring. When awake she was tireless in her quest for food, and was
+constantly digging in the earth, or turning over stones and
+tearing rotting logs and stumps into pieces. The little gray wood-
+mice were her piece de resistance, small as they were, and it
+amazed Neewa to see how quick his clumsy old mother could be when
+one of these little creatures was revealed. There were times when
+Noozak captured a whole family before they could escape. And to
+these were added frogs and toads, still partly somnambulent; many
+ants, curled up as if dead, in the heart of rotting logs; and
+occasional bumble-bees, wasps, and hornets. Now and then Neewa
+took a nibble at these things. On the third day Noozak uncovered a
+solid mass of hibernating vinegar ants as large as a man's two
+fists, and frozen solid. Neewa ate a quantity of these, and the
+sweet, vinegary flavour of them was delicious to his palate.
+
+As the days progressed, and living things began to crawl out from
+under logs and rocks, Neewa discovered the thrill and excitement
+of hunting on his own account. He encountered a second beetle, and
+killed it. He killed his first wood-mouse. Swiftly there were
+developing in him the instincts of Soominitik, his scrap-loving
+old father, who lived three or four valleys to the north of their
+own, and who never missed an opportunity to get into a fight. At
+four months of age, which was late in May, Neewa was eating many
+things that would have killed most cubs of his age, and there
+wasn't a yellow streak in him from the tip of his saucy little
+nose to the end of his stubby tail. He weighed nine pounds at this
+date and was as black as a tar-baby.
+
+It was early in June that the exciting event occurred which
+brought about the beginning of the big change in Neewa's life, and
+it was on a day so warm and mellow with sunshine that Noozak
+started in right after dinner to take her afternoon nap. They were
+out of the lower timber country now, and were in a valley through
+which a shallow stream wriggled and twisted around white sand-bars
+and between pebbly shores. Neewa was sleepless. He had less desire
+than ever to waste a glorious afternoon in napping. With his
+little round eyes he looked out on a wonderful world, and found it
+calling to him. He looked at his mother, and whined. Experience
+told him that she was dead to the world for hours to come, unless
+he tickled her foot or nipped her ear, and then she would only
+rouse herself enough to growl at him. He was tired of that. He
+yearned for something more exciting, and with his mind suddenly
+made up he set off in quest of adventure.
+
+In that big world of green and golden colours he was a little
+black ball nearly as wide as he was long. He went down to the
+creek, and looked back. He could still see his mother. Then his
+feet paddled in the soft white sand of a long bar that edged the
+shore, and he forgot Noozak. He went to the end of the bar, and
+turned up on the green shore where the young grass was like velvet
+under his paws. Here he began turning over small stones for ants.
+He chased a chipmunk that ran a close and furious race with him
+for twenty seconds. A little later a huge snow-shoe rabbit got up
+almost under his nose, and he chased that until in a dozen long
+leaps Wapoos disappeared in a thicket. Neewa wrinkled up his nose
+and emitted a squeaky snarl. Never had Soominitik's blood run so
+riotously within him. He wanted to get hold of something. For the
+first time in his life he was yearning for a scrap. He was like a
+small boy who the day after Christmas has a pair of boxing gloves
+and no opponent. He sat down and looked about him querulously,
+still wrinkling his nose and snarling defiantly. He had the whole
+world beaten. He knew that. Everything was afraid of his mother.
+Everything was afraid of HIM. It was disgusting--this lack of
+something alive for an ambitious young fellow to fight. After all,
+the world was rather tame.
+
+He set off at a new angle, came around the edge of a huge rock,
+and suddenly stopped.
+
+From behind the other end of the rock protruded a huge hind paw.
+For a few moments Neewa sat still, eyeing it with a growing
+anticipation. This time he would give his mother a nip that would
+waken her for good! He would rouse her to the beauty and the
+opportunities of this day if there was any rouse in him! So he
+advanced slowly and cautiously, picked out a nice bare spot on the
+paw, and sank his little teeth in it to the gums.
+
+There followed a roar that shook the earth. Now it happened that
+the paw did not belong to Noozak, but was the personal property of
+Makoos, an old he-bear of unlovely disposition and malevolent
+temper. But in him age had produced a grouchiness that was not at
+all like the grandmotherly peculiarities of old Noozak. Makoos was
+on his feet fairly before Neewa realized that he had made a
+mistake. He was not only an old bear and a grouchy bear, but he
+was also a hater of cubs. More than once in his day he had
+committed the crime of cannibalism. He was what the Indian hunter
+calls uchan--a bad bear, an eater of his own kind, and the instant
+his enraged eyes caught sight of Neewa he let out another roar.
+
+At that Neewa gathered his fat little legs under his belly and was
+off like a shot. Never before in his life had he run as he ran
+now. Instinct told him that at last he had met something which was
+not afraid of him, and that he was in deadly peril. He made no
+choice of direction, for now that he had made this mistake he had
+no idea where he would find his mother. He could hear Makoos
+coming after him, and as he ran he set up a bawling that was
+filled with a wild and agonizing prayer for help. That cry reached
+the faithful old Noozak. In an instant she was on her feet--and
+just in time. Like a round black ball shot out of a gun Neewa sped
+past the rock where she had been sleeping, and ten jumps behind
+him came Makoos. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother,
+but his momentum carried him past her. In that moment Noozak leapt
+into action. As a football player makes a tackle she rushed out
+just in time to catch old Makoos with all her weight full
+broadside in the ribs, and the two old bears rolled over and over
+in what to Neewa was an exciting and glorious mix-up.
+
+He had stopped, and his eyes bulged out like shining little onions
+as he took in the scene of battle. He had longed for a fight but
+what he saw now fairly paralyzed him. The two bears were at it,
+roaring and tearing each other's hides and throwing up showers of
+gravel and earth in their deadly clinch. In this first round
+Noozak had the best of it. She had butted the wind out of Makoos
+in her first dynamic assault, and now with her dulled and broken
+teeth at his throat she was lashing him with her sharp hind claws
+until the blood streamed from the old barbarian's sides and he
+bellowed like a choking bull. Neewa knew that it was his pursuer
+who was getting the worst of it, and with a squeaky cry for his
+mother to lambast the very devil out of Makoos he ran back to the
+edge of the arena, his nose crinkled and his teeth gleaming in a
+ferocious snarl. He danced about excitedly a dozen feet from the
+fighters, Soominitik's blood filling him with a yearning for the
+fray and yet he was afraid.
+
+Then something happened that suddenly and totally upset the
+maddening joy of his mother's triumph. Makoos, being a he-bear,
+was of necessity skilled in fighting, and all at once he freed
+himself from Noozak's jaws, wallowed her under him, and in turn
+began ripping the hide off old Noozak's carcass in such quantities
+that she let out an agonized bawling that turned Neewa's little
+heart into stone.
+
+It is a matter of most exciting conjecture what a small boy will
+do when he sees his father getting licked. If there is an axe
+handy he is liable to use it. The most cataclysmic catastrophe
+that cam come into his is to have a father whom some other boy's
+father has given a walloping. Next to being President of the
+United States the average small boy treasures the desire to
+possess a parent who can whip any other two-legged creature that
+wears trousers. And there were a lot of human things about Neewa.
+The louder his mother bawled the more distinctly he felt the shock
+of his world falling about him. If Noozak had lost a part of her
+strength in her old age her voice, at least, was still unimpaired,
+and such a spasm of outcry as she emitted could have been heard at
+least half a mile away.
+
+Neewa could stand no more. Blind with rage, he darted in. It was
+chance that closed his vicious little jaws on a toe that belonged
+to Makoos, and his teeth sank into the flesh like two rows of
+ivory needles. Makoos gave a tug, but Neewa held on, and bit
+deeper. Then Makoos drew up his leg and sent it out like a
+catapault, and in spite of his determination to hang on Neewa
+found himself sailing wildly through the air. He landed against a
+rock twenty feet from the fighters with a force that knocked the
+wind out of him, and for a matter of eight or ten seconds after
+that he wobbled dizzily in his efforts to stand up. Then his
+vision and his senses returned and he gazed on a scene that
+brought all the blood pounding back into his body again.
+
+Makoos was no longer fighting, but was RUNNING AWAY--and there was
+a decided limp in his gait!
+
+Poor old Noozak was standing on her feet, facing the retreating
+enemy. She was panting like a winded calf. Her jaws were agape.
+Her tongue lolled out, and blood was dripping in little trickles
+from her body to the ground. She had been thoroughly and
+efficiently mauled. She was beyond the shadow of a doubt a whipped
+bear. Yet in that glorious flight of the enemy Neewa saw nothing
+of Noozak's defeat. Their enemy was RUNNING AWAY! Therefore, he
+was whipped. And with excited little squeaks of joy Neewa ran to
+his mother.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+
+As they stood in the warm sunshine of this first day of June,
+watching the last of Makoos as he fled across the creek bottom,
+Neewa felt very much like an old and seasoned warrior instead of a
+pot-bellied, round-faced cub of four months who weighed nine
+pounds and not four hundred.
+
+It was many minutes after Neewa had sunk his ferocious little
+teeth deep into the tenderest part of the old he-bear's toe before
+Noozak could get her wind sufficiently to grunt. Her sides were
+pumping like a pair of bellows, and after Makoos had disappeared
+beyond the creek Neewa sat down on his chubby bottom, perked his
+funny ears forward, and eyed his mother with round and glistening
+eyes that were filled with uneasy speculation. With a wheezing
+groan Noozak turned and made her way slowly toward the big rock
+alongside which she had been sleeping when Neewa's fearful cries
+for help had awakened her. Every bone in her aged body seemed
+broken or dislocated. She limped and sagged and moaned as she
+walked, and behind her were left little red trails of blood in the
+green grass. Makoos had given her a fine pummeling.
+
+She lay down, gave a final groan, and looked at Neewa, as if to
+say:
+
+"If you hadn't gone off on some deviltry and upset that old
+viper's temper this wouldn't have happened. And now--look at ME!"
+
+A young bear would have rallied quickly from the effects of the
+battle, but Noozak lay without moving all the rest of that
+afternoon, and the night that followed. And that night was by all
+odds the finest that Neewa had ever seen. Now that the nights were
+warm, he had come to love the moon even more than the sun, for by
+birth and instinct he was more a prowler in darkness than a hunter
+of the day. The moon rose out of the east in a glory of golden
+fire. The spruce and balsam forests stood out like islands in a
+yellow sea of light, and the creek shimmered and quivered like a
+living thing as it wound its way through the glowing valley. But
+Neewa had learned his lesson, and though the moon and the stars
+called to him he hung close to his mother, listening to the
+carnival of night sound that came to him, but never moving away
+from her side.
+
+With the morning Noozak rose to her feet, and with a grunting
+command for Neewa to follow she slowly climbed the sun-capped
+ridge. She was in no mood for travel, but away back in her head
+was an unexpressed fear that villainous old Makoos might return,
+and she knew that another fight would do her up entirely, in which
+event Makoos would make a breakfast of Neewa. So she urged herself
+down the other side of the ridge, across a new valley, and through
+a cut that opened like a wide door into a rolling plain that was
+made up of meadows and lakes and great sweeps of spruce and cedar
+forest. For a week Noozak had been making for a certain creek in
+this plain, and now that the presence of Makoos threatened behind
+she kept at her journeying until Neewa's short, fat legs could
+scarcely hold up his body.
+
+It was mid-afternoon when they reached the creek, and Neewa was so
+exhausted that he had difficulty in climbing the spruce up which
+his mother sent him to take a nap. Finding a comfortable crotch he
+quickly fell asleep--while Noozak went fishing.
+
+The creek was alive with suckers, trapped in the shallow pools
+after spawning, and within an hour she had the shore strewn with
+them. When Neewa came down out of his cradle, just at the edge of
+dusk, it was to a feast at which Noozak had already stuffed
+herself until she looked like a barrel. This was his first meal of
+fish, and for a week thereafter he lived in a paradise of fish. He
+ate them morning, noon, and night, and when he was too full to eat
+he rolled in them. And Noozak stuffed herself until it seemed her
+hide would burst. Wherever they moved they carried with them a
+fishy smell that grew older day by day, and the older it became
+the more delicious it was to Neewa and his mother. And Neewa grew
+like a swelling pod. In that week he gained three pounds. He had
+given up nursing entirely now, for Noozak--being an old bear--had
+dried up to a point where she was hopelessly disappointing.
+
+It was early in the evening of the eighth day that Neewa and his
+mother lay down in the edge of a grassy knoll to sleep after their
+day's feasting. Noozak was by all odds the happiest old bear in
+all that part of the northland. Food was no longer a problem for
+her. In the creek, penned up in the pools, were unlimited
+quantities of it, and she had encountered no other bear to
+challenge her possession of it. She looked ahead to uninterrupted
+bliss in their happy hunting grounds until midsummer storms
+emptied the pools, or the berries ripened. And Neewa, a happy
+little gourmand, dreamed with her.
+
+It was this day, just as the sun was setting, that a man on his
+hands and knees was examining a damp patch of sand five or six
+miles down the creek. His sleeves were rolled up, baring his brown
+arms halfway to the shoulders and he wore no hat, so that the
+evening breeze ruffled a ragged head of blond hair that for a
+matter of eight or nine months had been cut with a hunting knife.
+
+Close on one side of this individual was a tin pail, and on the
+other, eying him with the keenest interest, one of the homeliest
+and yet one of the most companionable-looking dog pups ever born
+of a Mackenzie hound father and a mother half Airedale and half
+Spitz.
+
+With this tragedy of blood in his veins nothing in the world could
+have made the pup anything more than "just dog." His tail,--
+stretched out straight on the sand, was long and lean, with a knot
+at every joint; his paws, like an overgrown boy's feet, looked
+like small boxing-gloves; his head was three sizes too big for his
+body, and accident had assisted Nature in the perfection of her
+masterpiece by robbing him of a half of one of his ears. As he
+watched his master this half of an ear stood up like a galvanized
+stub, while the other--twice as long--was perked forward in the
+deepest and most interested enquiry. Head, feet, and tail were
+Mackenzie hound, but the ears and his lank, skinny body was a
+battle royal between Spitz and Airedale. At his present
+inharmonious stage of development he was the doggiest dog-pup
+outside the alleys of a big city.
+
+For the first time in several minutes his master spoke, and Miki
+wiggled from stem to stern in appreciation of the fact that it was
+directly to him the words were uttered.
+
+"It's a mother and a cub, as sure as you're a week old, Miki," he
+said. "And if I know anything about bears they were here some time
+to-day!"
+
+He rose to his feet, made note of the deepening shadows in the
+edge of the timber, and filled his pail with water. For a few
+moments the last rays of the sun lit up his face. It was a strong,
+hopeful face. In it was the joy of life. And now it was lighted up
+with a sudden inspiration, and a glow that was not of the forest
+alone came into his eyes, as he added:
+
+"Miki, I'm lugging your homely carcass down to the Girl because
+you're an unpolished gem of good nature and beauty--and for those
+two things I know she'll love you. She is my sister, you know.
+Now, if I could only take that cub along with you----"
+
+He began to whistle as he turned with his pail of water in the
+direction of a thin fringe of balsams a hundred yards away.
+
+Close at his heels followed Miki.
+
+Challoner, who was a newly appointed factor of the Great Hudson's
+Bay Company, had pitched his camp at tie edge of the lake dose to
+the mouth of the creek. There was not much to it--a battered tent,
+a still more battered canoe, and a small pile of dunnage. But in
+the last glow of the sunset it would have spoken volumes to a man
+with an eye trained to the wear and the turmoil of the forests. It
+was the outfit of a man who had gone unfearing to the rough edge
+of the world. And now what was left of it was returning with him.
+To Challoner there was something of human comradeship in these
+remnants of things that had gone through the greater part of a
+year's fight with him. The canoe was warped and battered and
+patched; smoke and storm had blackened his tent until it was the
+colour of rusty char, and his grub sacks were next to empty.
+
+Over a small fire title contents of a pan and a pot were brewing
+when he returned with Miki at his heels, and close to the heat was
+a battered and mended reflector in which a bannock of flour and
+water was beginning to brown. In one of the pots was coffee, in
+the other a boiling fish.
+
+Miki sat down on his angular haunches so that the odour of the
+fish filled his nostrils. This, he had discovered, was the next
+thing to eating. His eyes, as they followed Challoner's final
+preparatory movements, were as bright as garnets, and every third
+or fourth breath he licked his chops, and swallowed hungrily.
+That, in fact, was why Miki had got his name. He was always
+hungry, and apparently always empty, no matter how much he ate.
+Therefore his name, Miki, "The drum."
+
+It was not until they had eaten the fish and the bannock, and
+Challoner had lighted his pipe, that he spoke what was in his
+mind.
+
+"To-morrow I'm going after that bear," he said.
+
+Miki, curled up near the dying embers, gave his tail a club-like
+thump in evidence of the fact that he was listening.
+
+"I'm going to pair you up with the cub, and tickle the Girl to
+death."
+
+Miki thumped his tail harder than before.
+
+"Fine," he seemed to say.
+
+"Just think of it," said Challoner, looking over Miki's head a
+thousand miles away, "Fourteen months--and at last we're going
+home. I'm going to train you and the cub for that sister of mine.
+Eh, won't you like that? You don't know what she's like, you
+homely little devil, or you wouldn't sit there staring at me like
+a totem-pole pup! And it isn't in your stupid head to imagine how
+pretty she is. You saw that sunset to-night? Well, she's prettier
+than THAT if she is my sister. Got anything to add to that, Miki?
+If not, let's say our prayers and go to bed!"
+
+Challoner rose and stretched himself. His muscles cracked. He felt
+life surging like a giant within him.
+
+And Miki, thumping his tail until this moment, rose on his
+overgrown legs and followed his master into their shelter.
+
+It was in the gray light of the early summer dawn when Challoner
+came forth again, and rekindled the fire. Miki followed a few
+moments later, and his master fastened the end of a worn tent-rope
+around his neck and tied the rope to a sapling. Another rope of
+similar length Challoner tied to the corners of a grub sack so
+that it could be carried over his shoulder like a game bag. With
+the first rose-flush of the sun he was ready for the trail of
+Neewa and his mother. Miki set up a melancholy wailing when he
+found himself left behind, and when Challoner looked back the pup
+was tugging and somersaulting at the end of his rope like a
+jumping-jack. For a quarter of a mile up the creek he could hear
+Miki's entreating protest.
+
+To Challoner the business of the day was not a matter of personal
+pleasure, nor was it inspired alone by his desire to possess a cub
+along with Miki. He needed meat, and bear pork thus early in the
+season would be exceedingly good; and above all else he needed a
+supply of fat. If he bagged this bear, time would be saved all the
+rest of the way down to civilization.
+
+It was eight o'clock when he struck the first unmistakably fresh
+signs of Noozak and Neewa. It was at the point where Noozak had
+fished four or five days previously, and where they had returned
+yesterday to feast on the "ripened" catch. Challoner was elated.
+He was sure that he would find the pair along the creek, and not
+far distant. The wind was in his favour, and he began to advance
+with greater caution, his rifle ready for the anticipated moment.
+For an hour he travelled steadily and quietly, marking every sound
+and movement ahead of him, and wetting his finger now and then to
+see if the wind had shifted. After all, it was not so much a
+matter of human cunning. Everything was in Challoner's favour.
+
+In a wide, flat part of the valley where the creek split itself
+into a dozen little channels, and the water rippled between sandy
+bars and over pebbly shallows, Neewa and his mother were nosing
+about lazily for a breakfast of crawfish. The world had never
+looked more beautiful to Neewa. The sun made the soft hair on his
+back fluff up like that of a purring cat. He liked the plash of
+wet sand under his feet and the singing gush of water against his
+legs. He liked the sound that was all about him, the breath of the
+wind, the whispers that came out of the spruce-tops and the
+cedars, the murmur of water, the TWIT-TWIT of the rock rabbits,
+the call of birds; and more than all else the low, grunting talk
+of his mother.
+
+It was in this sun-bathed sweep of the valley that Noozak caught
+the first whiff of danger. It came to her in a sudden twist of the
+wind--the smell of man!
+
+Instantly she was turned into rock. There was still the deep scar
+in her shoulder which had come, years before, with that same smell
+of the one enemy she feared. For three summers she had not caught
+the taint in her nostrils and she had almost forgotten its
+existence. Now, so suddenly that it paralyzed her, it was warm and
+terrible in the breath of the wind.
+
+In this moment, too, Neewa seemed to sense the nearness of an
+appalling danger. Two hundred yards from Challoner he stood a
+motionless blotch of jet against the white of the sand about him,
+his eyes on his mother, and his sensitive little nose trying to
+catch the meaning of the menace in the air.
+
+Then came a thing he had never heard before--a splitting, cracking
+roar--something that was almost like thunder and yet unlike it;
+and he saw his mother lurch where she stood and crumple down all
+at once on her fore legs.
+
+The next moment she was up, with a wild WHOOF in her voice that
+was new to him--a warning for him to fly for his life.
+
+Like all mothers who have known the comradeship and love of a
+child, Noozak's first thought was of him. Reaching out a paw she
+gave him a sudden shove, and Neewa legged it wildly for the near-
+by shelter of the timber. Noozak followed. A second shot came, and
+close over her head there sped a purring, terrible sound. But
+Noozak did not hurry. She kept behind Neewa, urging him on even as
+that pain of a red-hot iron in her groin filled her with agony.
+They came to the edge of the timber as Challoner's third shot bit
+under Noozak's feet.
+
+A moment more and they were within the barricade of the timber.
+Instinct guided Neewa into the thickest part of it, and close
+behind him Noozak fought with the last of her dying strength to
+urge him on. In her old brain there was growing a deep and
+appalling shadow, something that was beginning to cloud her vision
+so that she could not see, and she knew that at last she had come
+to the uttermost end of her trail. With twenty years of life
+behind her, she struggled now for a last few seconds. She stopped
+Neewa close to a thick cedar, and as she had done many times
+before she commanded him to climb it. Just once her hot tongue
+touched his face in a final caress. Then she turned to fight her
+last great fight.
+
+Straight into the face of Challoner she dragged herself, and fifty
+feet from the spruce she stopped and waited for him, her head
+drooped between her shoulders, her sides heaving, her eyes dimming
+more and more, until at last she sank down with a great sigh,
+barring the trail of their enemy. For a space, it may be, she saw
+once more the golden moons and the blazing suns of those twenty
+years that were gone; it may be that the soft, sweet music of
+spring came to her again, filled with the old, old song of life,
+and that Something gracious and painless descended upon her as a
+final reward for a glorious motherhood on earth.
+
+When Challoner came up she was dead.
+
+From his hiding place in a crotch of the spruce Neewa looked down
+on the first great tragedy of his life, and the advent of man. The
+two-legged beast made him cringe deeper into his refuge, and his
+little heart was near breaking with the terror that had seized
+upon him. He did not reason. It was by no miracle of mental
+process that he knew something terrible had happened, and that
+this tall, two-legged creature was the cause of it. His little
+eyes were blazing, just over the level of the crotch. He wondered
+why his mother did not get up and fight when this new enemy came.
+Frightened as he was he was ready to snarl if she would only wake
+up--ready to hurry down the tree and help her as he had helped her
+in the defeat of Makoos, the old he-bear. But not a muscle of
+Noozak's huge body moved as Challoner bent over her. She was stone
+dead.
+
+Challoner's face was flushed with exultation. Necessity had made
+of him a killer. He saw in Noozak a splendid pelt, and a provision
+of meat that would carry him all the rest of the way to the
+southland. He leaned his rifle against a tree and began looking
+about for the cub. Knowledge of the wild told him it would not be
+far from its mother, and he began looking into the trees and the
+near-by thickets.
+
+In the shelter of his crotch, screened by the thick branches,
+Neewa made himself as small as possible during the search. At the
+end of half an hour Challoner disappointedly gave up his quest,
+and went back to the creek for a drink before setting himself to
+the task of skinning Noozak.
+
+No sooner was he gone than Neewa's little head shot up alertly.
+For a few moments he watched, and then slipped backward down the
+trunk of the cedar to the ground. He gave his squealing call, but
+his mother did not move. He went to her and stood beside her
+motionless head, sniffing the man-tainted air. Then he muzzled her
+jowl, butted his nose under her neck, and at last nipped her ear--
+always his last resort in the awakening process. He was puzzled.
+He whined softly, and climbed upon his mother's big, soft back,
+and sat there. Into his whine there came a strange note, and then
+out of his throat there rose a whimpering cry that was like the
+cry of a child.
+
+Challoner heard that cry as he came back, and something seemed to
+grip hold of his heart suddenly, and choke him. He had heard
+children crying like that; and it was the motherless cub!
+
+Creeping up behind a dwarf spruce he looked where Noozak lay dead,
+and saw Neewa perched on his mother's back. He had killed many
+things in his time, for it was his business to kill, and to barter
+in the pelts of creatures that others killed. But he had seen
+nothing like this before, and he felt all at once as if he had
+done murder.
+
+"I'm sorry," he breathed softly, "you poor little devil; I'm
+sorry!"
+
+It was almost a prayer--for forgiveness. Yet there was but one
+thing to do now. So quietly that Neewa failed to hear him he crept
+around with the wind and stole up behind. He was within a dozen
+feet of Neewa before the cub suspected danger. Then it was too
+late. In a swift rush Challoner was upon him and, before Neewa
+could leave the back of his mother, had smothered him in the folds
+of the grub sack.
+
+In all his life Challoner had never experienced a livelier five
+minutes than the five that followed. Above Neewa's grief and his
+fear there rose the savage fighting blood of old Soominitik, his
+father. He clawed and bit and kicked and snarled. In those five
+minutes he was five little devils all rolled into one, and by the
+time Challoner had the rope fastened about Neewa's neck, and his
+fat body chucked into the sack, his hands were scratched and
+lacerated in a score of places.
+
+In the sack Neewa continued to fight until he was exhausted, while
+Challoner skinned Noozak and cut from her the meat and fats which
+he wanted. The beauty of Noozak's pelt brought a glow into his
+eyes. In it he rolled the meat and fats, and with babiche thong
+bound the whole into a pack around which he belted the dunnage
+ends of his shoulder straps. Weighted under the burden of sixty
+pounds of pelt and meat he picked up his rifle--and Neewa. It had
+been early afternoon when he left. It was almost sunset when he
+reached camp. Every foot of the way, until the last half mile,
+Neewa fought like a Spartan.
+
+Now he lay limp and almost lifeless in his sack, and when Miki
+came up to smell suspiciously of his prison he made no movement of
+protest. All smells were alike to him now, and of sounds he made
+no distinction. Challoner was nearly done for. Every muscle and
+bone in his body had its ache. Yet in his face, sweaty and grimed,
+was a grin of pride.
+
+"You plucky little devil," he said, contemplating the limp sack as
+he loaded his pipe for the first time that afternoon. "You--you
+plucky little devil!"
+
+He tied the end of Neewa's rope halter to a sapling, and began
+cautiously to open the grub sack. Then he rolled Neewa out on the
+ground, and stepped back. In that hour Neewa was willing to accept
+a truce so far as Challoner was concerned. But it was not
+Challoner that his half-blinded eyes saw first as he rolled from
+his bag. It was Miki! And Miki, his awkward body wriggling with
+the excitement of his curiosity, was almost on the point of
+smelling of him!
+
+Neewa's little eyes glared. Was that ill-jointed lop-eared
+offspring of the man-beast an enemy, too? Were those twisting
+convolutions of this new creature's body and the club-like swing
+of his tail an invitation to fight? He judged so. Anyway, here was
+something of his size, and like a flash he was at the end of his
+rope and on the pup. Miki, a moment before bubbling over with
+friendship and good cheer, was on his back in an instant, his
+grotesque legs paddling the air and his yelping cries for help
+rising in a wild clamour that filled the golden stillness of the
+evening with an unutterable woe.
+
+Challoner stood dumbfounded. In another moment he would have
+separated the little fighters, but something happened that stopped
+him. Neewa, standing squarely over Miki, with Miki's four over-
+grown paws held aloft as if signalling an unqualified surrender,
+slowly drew his teeth from the pup's loose hide. Again he saw the
+man-beast. Instinct, keener than a clumsy reasoning, held him for
+a few moments without movement, his beady eyes on Challoner. In
+midair Miki wagged his paws; he whined softly; his hard tail
+thumped the ground as he pleaded for mercy, and he licked his
+chops and tried to wriggle, as if to tell Neewa that he had no
+intention at all to do him harm. Neewa, facing Challoner, snarled
+defiantly. He drew himself slowly from over Miki. And Miki, afraid
+to move, still lay on his back with his paws in the air.
+
+Very slowly, a look of wonder in his face, Challoner drew back
+into the tent and peered through a rent in the canvas.
+
+The snarl left Neewa's face. He looked at the pup. Perhaps away
+back in some corner of his brain the heritage of instinct was
+telling him of what he had lost because of brothers and sisters
+unborn--the comradeship of babyhood, the play of children. And
+Miki must have sensed the change in the furry little black
+creature who a moment ago was his enemy. His tail thumped almost
+frantically, and he swung out his front paws toward Neewa. Then, a
+little fearful of what might happen, he rolled on his side. Still
+Neewa did not move. Joyously Miki wriggled.
+
+A moment later, looking through the slit in the canvas, Challoner
+saw them cautiously smelling noses.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+
+That night came a cold and drizzling rain from out of the north
+and the east. In the wet dawn Challoner came out to start a fire,
+and in a hollow under a spruce root he found Miki and Neewa
+cuddled together, sound asleep.
+
+It was the cub who first saw the man-beast, and for a brief space
+before the pup roused himself Neewa's shining eyes were fixed on
+the strange enemy who had so utterly changed his world for him.
+Exhaustion had made him sleep through the long hours of that first
+night of captivity, and in sleep he had forgotten many things. But
+now it all came back to him as he cringed deeper into his shelter
+under the root, and so softly that only Miki heard him he
+whimpered for his mother.
+
+It was the whimper that roused Miki. Slowly he untangled himself
+from the ball into which he had rolled, stretched his long and
+overgrown legs, and yawned so loudly that the sound reached
+Challoner's ears. The man turned and saw two pairs of eyes fixed
+upon him from the sheltered hollow under the root. The pup's one
+good ear and the other that was half gone stood up alertly, as he
+greeted his master with the boundless good cheer of an
+irrepressible comradeship. Challoner's face, wet with the drizzle
+of the gray skies and bronzed by the wind and storm of fourteen
+months in the northland, lighted up with a responsive grin, and
+Miki wriggled forth weaving and twisting himself into grotesque
+contortions expressive of happiness at being thus directly smiled
+at by his master.
+
+With all the room under the root left to him Neewa pulled himself
+back until only his round head was showing, and from this fortress
+of temporary safety his bright little eyes glared forth at his
+mother's murderer.
+
+Vividly the tragedy of yesterday was before him again--the warm,
+sun-filled creek bottom in which he and Noozak, his mother, were
+hunting a breakfast of crawfish when the man-beast came; the crash
+of strange thunder, their flight into the timber, and the end of
+it all when his mother turned to confront their enemy. And yet it
+was not the death of his mother that remained with him most
+poignantly this morning. It was the memory of his own terrific
+fight with the white man, and his struggle afterward in the black
+and suffocating depths of the bag in which Challoner had brought
+him to his camp. Even now Challoner was looking at the scratches
+on his hands. He advanced a few steps, and grinned down at Neewa,
+just as he had grinned good-humouredly at Miki, the angular pup.
+
+Neewa's little eyes blazed.
+
+"I told you last night that I was sorry," said Challoner, speaking
+as if to one of his own kind.
+
+In several ways Challoner was unusual, an out-of-the-ordinary type
+in the northland. He believed, for instance, in a certain specific
+psychology of the animal mind, and had proven to his own
+satisfaction that animals treated and conversed with in a matter-
+of-fact human way frequently developed an understanding which he,
+in his unscientific way, called reason.
+
+"I told you I was sorry," he repeated, squatting on his heels
+within a yard of the root from under which Neewa's eyes were
+glaring at him, "and I am. I'm sorry I killed your mother. But we
+had to have meat and fat. Besides, Miki and I are going to make it
+up to you. We're going to take you along with us down to the Girl,
+and if you don't learn to love her you're the meanest, lowest-down
+little cuss in all creation and don't deserve a mother. You and
+Miki are going to be brothers. His mother is dead, too--plum
+starved to death, which is worse than dying with a bullet in your
+lung. And I found Miki just as I found you, hugging up close to
+her an' crying as if there wasn't any world left for him. So cheer
+up, and give us your paw. Let's shake!"
+
+Challoner held out his hand. Neewa was as motionless as a stone. A
+few moments before he would have snarled and bared his teeth. But
+now he was dead still. This was by all odds the strangest beast he
+had ever seen. Yesterday it had not harmed him, except to put him
+into the bag. And now it did not offer to harm him. More than
+that, the talk it made was not unpleasant, or threatening. His
+eyes took in Miki. The pup had squeezed himself squarely between
+Challoner's knees and was looking at him in a puzzled, questioning
+sort of way, as if to ask: "Why don't you come out from under that
+root and help get breakfast?"
+
+Challoner's hand came nearer, and Neewa crowded himself back until
+there was not another inch of room for him to fill. Then the
+miracle happened. The man-beast's paw touched his head. It sent a
+strange and terrible thrill through him. Yet it did not hurt. If
+he had not wedged himself in so tightly he would have scratched
+and bitten. But he could do neither.
+
+Slowly Challoner worked his fingers to the loose hide at the back
+of Neewa's neck. Miki, surmising that something momentous was
+about to happen, watched the proceedings with popping eyes. Then
+Challoner's fingers closed and the next instant he dragged Neewa
+forth and held him at arm's length, kicking and squirming, and
+setting up such a bawling that in sheer sympathy Miki raised his
+voice and joined in the agonized orgy of sound. Half a minute
+later Challoner had Neewa once more in the prison-sack, but this
+time he left the cub's head protruding, and drew in the mouth of
+the sack closely about his neck, fastening it securely with a
+piece of babiche string. Thus three quarters of Neewa was
+imprisoned in the sack, with only his head sticking out. He was a
+cub in a poke.
+
+Leaving the cub to roll and squirm in protest Challoner went about
+the business of getting breakfast. For once Miki found a
+proceeding more interesting than that operation, and he hovered
+about Neewa as he struggled and bawled, trying vainly to offer him
+some assistance in the matter of sympathy. Finally Neewa lay
+still, and Miki sat down close beside him and eyed his master with
+serious questioning if not actual disapprobation.
+
+The gray sky was breaking with the promise of the sun when
+Challoner was ready to renew his long journey into the southland.
+He packed his canoe, leaving Neewa and Miki until the last. In the
+bow of the canoe he made a soft nest of the skin taken from the
+cub's mother. Then he called Miki and tied the end of a worn rope
+around his neck, after which he fastened the other end of this
+rope around the neck of Neewa. Thus he had the cub and the pup on
+the same yard-long halter. Taking each of the twain by the scruff
+of the neck he carried them to the canoe and placed them in the
+nest he had made of Noozak's hide.
+
+"Now you youngsters be good," he warned. "We're going to aim at
+forty miles to-day to make up for the time we lost yesterday."
+
+As the canoe shot out a shaft of sunlight broke through the sky
+low in the east.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+
+During the first few moments in which the canoe moved swiftly over
+the surface of the lake an amazing change had taken place in
+Neewa. Challoner did not see it, and Miki was unconscious of it.
+But every fibre in Neewa's body was atremble, and his heart was
+thumping as it had pounded on that glorious day of the fight
+between his mother and the old he-bear. It seemed to him that
+everything that he had lost was coming back to him, and that all
+would be well very soon--FOR HE SMELLED HIS MOTHER! And then he
+discovered that the scent of her was warm and strong in the furry
+black mass under his feet, and he smothered himself down in it,
+flat on his plump little belly, and peered at Challoner over his
+paws.
+
+It was hard for him to understand--the man-beast back there,
+sending the canoe through the water, and under him his mother,
+warm and soft, but so deadly still! He could not keep the whimper
+out of his throat--his low and grief-filled call for HER. And
+there was no answer, except Miki's responsive whine, the crying of
+one child for another. Neewa's mother did not move. She made no
+sound. And he could see nothing of her but her black and furry
+skin--without head, without feet, without the big, bald paws he
+had loved to tickle, and the ears he had loved to nip. There was
+nothing of her but the patch of black skin--and the SMELL.
+
+But a great comfort warmed his frightened little soul. He felt the
+protecting nearness of an unconquerable and abiding force and in
+the first of the warm sunshine his back fluffed up, and he thrust
+his brown nose between his paws and into his mother's fur. Miki,
+as if vainly striving to solve the mystery of his new-found chum,
+was watching him closely from between his own fore-paws. In his
+comical head--adorned with its one good ear and its one bad one,
+and furthermore beautified by the outstanding whiskers inherited
+from his Airedale ancestor--he was trying to come to some sort of
+an understanding. At the outset he had accepted Neewa as a friend
+and a comrade--and Neewa had thanklessly given him a good mauling
+for his trouble. That much Miki could forgive and forget. What he
+could not forgive was the utter lack of regard which Neewa seemed
+to possess for him. His playful antics had gained no recognition
+from the cub. When he had barked and hopped about, flattening and
+contorting himself in warm invitation for him to join in a game of
+tag or a wrestling match, Neewa had simply stared at him like an
+idiot. He was wondering, perhaps, if Neewa would enjoy anything
+besides a fight. It was a long time before he decided to make
+another experiment.
+
+It was, as a matter of fact, halfway between breakfast and noon.
+In all that time Neewa had scarcely moved, and Miki was finding
+himself bored to death. The discomfort of last night's storm was
+only a memory, and overhead there was a sun unshadowed by cloud.
+More than an hour before Challoner's canoe had left the lake, and
+was now in the clear-running water of a stream that was making its
+way down the southward slope of the divide between Jackson's Knee
+and the Shamattawa. It was a new stream to Challoner, fed by the
+large lake above, and guarding himself against the treachery of
+waterfall and rapid he kept a keen lookout ahead. For a matter of
+half an hour the water had been growing steadily swifter, and
+Challoner was satisfied that before very long he would be
+compelled to make a portage. A little later he heard ahead of him
+the low and steady murmur which told him he was approaching a
+danger zone. As he shot around the next bend, hugging fairly close
+to shore, he saw, four or five hundred yards below him, a rock-
+frothed and boiling maelstrom of water.
+
+Swiftly his eyes measured the situation. The rapids ran between an
+almost precipitous shore on one side and a deep forest on the
+other. He saw at a glance that it was the forest side over which
+he must make the portage, and this was the shore opposite him and
+farthest away. Swinging his canoe at a 45-degree angle he put all
+the strength of body and arms into the sweep of his paddle. There
+would be just time to reach the other shore before the current
+became dangerous. Above the sweep of the rapids he could now hear
+the growling roar of a waterfall below.
+
+It was at this unfortunate moment that Miki decided to venture one
+more experiment with Neewa. With a friendly yip he swung out one
+of his paws. Now Miki's paw, for a pup, was monstrously big, and
+his foreleg was long and lanky, so that when the paw landed
+squarely on the end of Neewa's nose it was like the swing of a
+prize-fighter's glove. The unexpectedness of it was a further
+decisive feature in the situation; and, on top of this, Miki swung
+his other paw around like a club and caught Neewa a jolt in the
+eye. This was too much, even from a friend, and with a sudden
+snarl Neewa bounced out of his nest and clinched with the pup.
+
+Now the fact was that Miki, who had so ingloriously begged for
+mercy in their first scrimmage, came of fighting stock himself.
+Mix the blood of a Mackenzie hound--which is the biggest-footed,
+biggest-shouldered, most powerful dog in the northland--with the
+blood of a Spitz and an Airedale and something is bound to come of
+it. While the Mackenzie dog, with his ox-like strength, is
+peaceable and good-humoured in all sorts of weather, there is a
+good deal of the devil in the northern Spitz and Airedale and it
+is a question which likes a fight the best. And all at once good-
+humoured little Miki felt the devil rising in him. This time he
+did not yap for mercy. He met Neewa's jaws, and in two seconds
+they were staging a first-class fight on the bit of precarious
+footing in the prow of the canoe.
+
+Vainly Challoner yelled at them as he paddled desperately to beat
+out the danger of the rapids. Neewa and Miki were too absorbed to
+hear him. Miki's four paws were paddling the air again, but this
+time his sharp teeth were firmly fixed in the loose hide under
+Neewa's neck, and with his paws he continued to kick and bat in a
+way that promised effectively to pummel the wind out of Neewa had
+not the thing happened which Challoner feared. Still in a clinch
+they rolled off the prow of the canoe into the swirling current of
+the stream.
+
+For ten seconds or so they utterly disappeared. Then they bobbed
+up, a good fifty feet below him, their heads close together as
+they sped swiftly toward the doom that awaited them, and a choking
+cry broke from Challoner's lips. He was powerless to save them,
+and in his cry was the anguish of real grief. For many weeks Miki
+had been his only chum and comrade.
+
+Held together by the yard-long rope to which they were fastened,
+Miki and Neewa swept into the frothing turmoil of the rapids. For
+Miki it was the kindness of fate that had inspired his master to
+fasten him to the same rope with Neewa. Miki, at three months of
+age--weight, fourteen pounds--was about 80 per cent. bone and only
+a half of 1 per cent. fat; while Neewa, weight thirteen pounds,
+was about 90 per cent. fat. Therefore Miki had the floating
+capacity of a small anchor, while Neewa was a first-class life-
+preserver, and almost unsinkable.
+
+In neither of the youngsters was there a yellow streak. Both were
+of fighting stock, and, though Miki was under water most of the
+time during their first hundred-yard dash through the rapids,
+never for an instant did he give up the struggle to keep his nose
+in the air. Sometimes he was on his back and sometimes on his
+belly; but no matter what his position, he kept his four overgrown
+paws going like paddles. To an extent this helped Neewa in the
+heroic fight he was making to keep from shipping too much water
+himself. Had he been alone his ten or eleven pounds of fat would
+have carried him down-stream like a toy balloon covered with fur,
+but, with the fourteen-pound drag around his neck, the problem of
+not going under completely was a serious one. Half a dozen times
+he did disappear for an instant when some undertow caught Miki and
+dragged him down--head, tail, legs, and all. But Neewa always rose
+again, his four fat legs working for dear life.
+
+Then came the waterfall. By this time Miki had become accustomed
+to travelling under water, and the full horror of the new
+cataclysm into which they were plunged was mercifully lost to him.
+His paws had almost ceased their motion. He was still conscious of
+the roar in his ears, but the affair was less unpleasant than it
+was at the beginning. In fact, he was drowning. To Neewa the
+pleasant sensations of a painless death were denied. No cub in the
+world was wider awake than he when the final catastrophe came. His
+head was well above water and he was clearly possessed of all his
+senses. Then the river itself dropped out from under him and he
+shot down in an avalanche of water, feeling no longer the drag of
+Miki's weight at his neck.
+
+How deep the pool was at the bottom of the waterfall Challoner
+might have guessed quite accurately. Could Neewa have expressed an
+opinion of his own, he would have sworn that it was a mile. Miki
+was past the stage of making estimates, or of caring whether it
+was two feet or two leagues. His paws had ceased to operate and he
+had given himself up entirely to his fate. But Neewa came up
+again, and Miki followed, like a bobber. He was about to gasp his
+last gasp when the force of the current, as it swung out of the
+whirlpool, flung Neewa upon a bit of partly submerged driftage,
+and in a wild and strenuous effort to make himself safe Neewa
+dragged Miki's head out of water so that the pup hung at the edge
+of the driftage like a hangman's victim at the end of his rope.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+
+It is doubtful whether in the few moments that followed, any
+clear-cut mental argument passed through Neewa's head. It is too
+much to suppose that he deliberately set about assisting the half-
+dead and almost unconscious Miki from his precarious position. His
+sole ambition was to get himself where it was safe and dry, and to
+do this he of necessity had to drag the pup with him. So Neewa
+tugged at the end of his rope, digging his sharp little claws into
+the driftwood, and as he advanced Miki was dragged up head
+foremost out of the cold and friendless stream. It was a simple
+process. Neewa reached a log around which the water was eddying,
+and there he flattened himself down and hung on as he had never
+hung to anything else in his life. The log was entirely hidden
+from shore by a dense growth of brushwood. Otherwise, ten minutes
+later Challoner would have seen them.
+
+As it was, Miki had not sufficiently recovered either to smell or
+hear his master when Challoner came to see if there was a
+possibility of his small comrade being alive. And Neewa only
+hugged the log more tightly. He had seen enough of the man-beast
+to last him for the remainder of his life. It was half an hour
+before Miki began to gasp, and cough, and gulp up water, and for
+the first time since their scrap in the canoe the cub began to
+take a live interest in him. In another ten minutes Miki raised
+his head and looked about him. At that Neewa gave a tug on the
+rope, as if to advise him that it was time to get busy if they
+were expected to reach shore. And Miki, drenched and forlorn,
+resembling more a starved bone than a thing of skin and flesh,
+actually made an effort to wag his tail when he saw Neewa.
+
+He was still in a couple of inches of water, and with a hopeful
+eye on the log upon which Neewa was squatted he began to work his
+wobbly legs toward it. It was a high log, and a dry log, and when
+Miki reached it his unlucky star was with him again. Cumbrously he
+sprawled himself against it, and as he scrambled and scraped with
+his four awkward legs to get up alongside Neewa he gave to the log
+the slight push which it needed to set it free of the sunken
+driftage. Slowly at first the eddying current carried one end of
+the log away from its pier. Then the edge of the main current
+caught at it, viciously--and so suddenly that Miki almost lost his
+precarious footing, the log gave a twist, righted itself, and
+began, to scud down stream at a speed that would have made
+Challoner hug his breath had he been in their position with his
+faithful canoe.
+
+In fact, Challoner was at this very moment portaging the rapids
+below the waterfall. To have set his canoe in them where Miki and
+Neewa were gloriously sailing he would have considered an
+inexcusable hazard, and as a matter of safety he was losing the
+better part of a couple of hours by packing his outfit through the
+forest to a point half a mile below. That half mile was to the cub
+and the pup a show which was destined to live in their memories
+for as long as they were alive.
+
+They were facing each other about amidships of the log, Neewa
+flattened tight, his sharp claws dug in like hooks, and his little
+brown eyes half starting from his head. It would have taken a
+crowbar to wrench him from the log. But with Miki it was an open
+question from the beginning whether he would weather the storm. He
+had no claws that he could dig into the wood, and it was
+impossible for him to use his clumsy legs as Neewa used his--like
+two pairs of human arms. All he could do was to balance himself,
+slipping this way or that as the log rolled or swerved in its
+course, sometimes lying across it and sometimes lengthwise, and
+every moment with the jaws of uncertainty open wide for him.
+Neewa's eyes never left him for an instant. Had they been gimlets
+they would have bored holes. From the acuteness of this life-and-
+death stare one would have given Neewa credit for understanding
+that his own personal safety depended not so much upon his claws
+and his hug as upon Miki's seamanship. If Miki went overboard
+there would be left but one thing for him to do--and that would be
+to follow.
+
+The log, being larger and heavier at one end than at the other,
+swept on without turning broadside, and with the swiftness and
+appearance of a huge torpedo. While Neewa's back was turned toward
+the horror of frothing water and roaring rock behind him, Miki,
+who was facing it, lost none of its spectacular beauty. Now and
+then the log shot into one of the white masses of foam and for an
+instant or two would utterly disappear; and at these intervals
+Miki would hold his breath and close his eyes while Neewa dug his
+toes in still deeper. Once the log grazed a rock. Six inches more
+and they would have been without a ship. Their trip was not half
+over before both cub and pup looked like two round balls of lather
+out of which their eyes peered wildly.
+
+Swiftly the roar of the cataract was left behind; the huge rocks
+around which the current boiled and twisted with a ferocious
+snarling became fewer; there came open spaces in which the log
+floated smoothly and without convulsions, and then, at last, the
+quiet and placid flow of calm water. Not until then did the two
+balls of suds make a move. For the first time Neewa saw the whole
+of the thing they had passed through, and Miki, looking down
+stream, saw the quiet shores again, the deep forest, and the
+stream aglow with the warm sun. He drew in a breath that filled
+his whole body and let it out again with a sigh of relief so deep
+and sincere that it blew out a scatter of foam from the ends of
+his nose and whiskers. For the first time he became conscious of
+his own discomfort. One of his hind legs was twisted under him,
+and a foreleg was under his chest. The smoothness of the water and
+the nearness of the shores gave him confidence, and he proceeded
+to straighten himself. Unlike Neewa he was an experienced
+VOYAGEUR. For more than a month he had travelled steadily with
+Challoner in his canoe, and of ordinarily decent water he was
+unafraid. So he perked up a little, and offered Neewa a
+congratulatory yip that was half a whine.
+
+But Neewa's education had travelled along another line, and while
+his experience in a canoe had been confined to that day he did
+know what a log was. He knew from more than one adventure of his
+own that a log in the water is the next thing to a live thing, and
+that its capacity for playing evil jokes was beyond any
+computation that he had ever been able to make. That was where
+Miki's store of knowledge was fatally defective. Inasmuch as the
+log had carried them safely through the worst stretch of water he
+had ever seen he regarded it in the light of a first-class canoe--
+with the exception that it was unpleasantly rounded on top. But
+this little defect did not worry him. To Neewa's horror he sat up
+boldly, and looked about him.
+
+Instinctively the cub hugged the log still closer, while Miki was
+seized with an overwhelming desire to shake from himself the mass
+of suds in which, with the exception of the end of his tail and
+his eyes, he was completely swathed. He had often shaken himself
+in the canoe; why not here? Without either asking or answering the
+question he did it.
+
+Like the trap of a gibbet suddenly sprung by the hangman, the log
+instantly responded by turning half over. Without so much as a
+wail Miki was off like a shot, hit the water with a deep and
+solemn CHUG, and once more disappeared as completely as if he had
+been made of lead.
+
+Finding himself completely submerged for the first time, Neewa
+hung on gloriously, and when the log righted itself again he was
+tenaciously hugging his old place, all the froth washed from him.
+He looked for Miki--but Miki was gone. And then he felt once more
+that choking drag on his neck! Of necessity, because his head was
+pulled in the direction of the rope, he saw where the rope
+disappeared in the water. But there was no Miki. The pup was down
+too far for Neewa to see. With the drag growing heavier and
+heavier--for here there was not much current to help Miki along--
+Neewa hung on like grim death. If he had let go, and had joined
+Miki in the water, the good fortune which was turning their way
+would have been missed. For Miki, struggling well under water, was
+serving both as an anchor and a rudder; slowly the log shifted its
+course, was caught in a beach-eddy, and drifted in close to a
+muddy bank.
+
+With one wild leap Neewa was ashore. Feeling the earth under his
+feet he started to run, and the result was that Miki came up
+slowly through the mire and spread himself out like an overgrown
+crustacean while he got the wind back into his lungs. Neewa,
+sensing the fact that for a few moments his comrade was physically
+unfit for travel, shook himself, and waited. Miki picked up
+quickly. Within five minutes he was on his feet shaking himself so
+furiously that Neewa became the centre of a shower of mud and
+water.
+
+Had they remained where they were, Challoner would have found them
+an hour or so later, for he paddled that way, close inshore,
+looking for their bodies. It may be that the countless generations
+of instinct back of Neewa warned him of that possibility, for
+within a quarter of an hour after they had landed he was leading
+the way into the forest, and Miki was following. It was a new
+adventure for the pup.
+
+But Neewa began to recover his good cheer. For him the forest was
+home even if his mother was missing. After his maddening
+experiences with Miki and the man-beast the velvety touch of the
+soft pine-needles under his feet and the familiar smells of the
+silent places filled him with a growing joy. He was back in his
+old trails. He sniffed the air and pricked up his ears, thrilled
+by the enlivening sensations of knowing that he was once more the
+small master of his own destiny. It was a new forest, but Neewa
+was undisturbed by this fact. All forests were alike to him,
+inasmuch as several hundred thousand square miles were included in
+his domain and it was impossible for him to landmark them all.
+
+With Miki it was different. He not only began to miss Challoner
+and the river, but became more and more disturbed the farther
+Neewa led him into the dark and mysterious depths of the timber.
+At last he decided to set up a vigorous protest, and in line with
+this decision he braced himself so suddenly that Neewa, coming to
+the end of the rope, flopped over on his back with an astonished
+grunt. Seizing his advantage Miki turned, and tugging with the
+horse-like energy of his Mackenzie father he started back toward
+the river, dragging Neewa after him for a space of ten or fifteen
+feet before the cub succeeded in regaining his feet.
+
+Then the battle began. With their bottoms braced and their
+forefeet digging into the soft earth, they pulled on the rope in
+opposite directions until their necks stretched and their eyes
+began to pop. Neewa's pull was steady and unexcited, while Miki,
+dog-like, yanked and convulsed himself in sudden backward jerks
+that made Neewa give way an inch at a time. It was, after all,
+only a question as to which possessed the most enduring neck.
+Under Neewa's fat there was as yet little real physical strength.
+Miki had him handicapped there. Under the pup's loose hide and his
+overgrown bones there was a lot of pull, and after bracing himself
+heroically for another dozen feet Neewa gave up the contest and
+followed in the direction chosen by Miki.
+
+While the instincts of Neewa's breed would have taken him back to
+the river as straight as a die, Miki's intentions were better than
+was his sense of orientation. Neewa followed in a sweeter temper
+when he found that his companion was making an unreasonable circle
+which was taking them a little more slowly, but just as surely,
+away from the danger-ridden stream. At the end of another quarter
+of an hour Miki was utterly lost; he sat down on his rump, looked
+at Neewa, and confessed as much--with a low whine. Neewa did not
+move. His sharp little eyes were fixed suddenly on an object that
+hung to a low bush half a dozen paces from them. Before the man-
+beast's appearance the cub had spent three quarters of his time in
+eating, but since yesterday morning he had not swallowed so much
+as a bug. He was completely empty, and the object he saw hanging
+to the bush set every salivary gland in his mouth working. It was
+a wasp's nest. Many times in his young life he had seen Noozak,
+his mother, go up to nests like that, tear them down, crush them
+under her big paw, and then invite him to the feast of dead wasps
+within. For at least a month wasps had been included in his daily
+fare, and they were as good as anything he knew of. He approached
+the nest; Miki followed. When they were within three feet of it
+Miki began to take notice of a very distinct and peculiarly
+disquieting buzzing sound. Neewa was not at all alarmed; judging
+the distance of the nest from the ground, he rose on his hind
+feet, raised his arms, and gave it a fatal tug.
+
+Instantly the drone which Miki had heard changed into the angry
+buzzing of a saw. Quick as a flash Neewa's mother would have had
+the nest under her paws and the life crushed out of it, while
+Neewa's tug had only served partly to dislodge the home of Ahmoo
+and his dangerous tribe. And it happened that Ahmoo was at home
+with three quarters of his warriors. Before Neewa could give the
+nest a second tug they were piling out of it in a cloud and
+suddenly a wild yell of agony rose out of Miki. Ahmoo himself had
+landed on the end of the dog's nose. Neewa made no sound, but
+stood for a moment swiping at his face with both paws, while Miki,
+still yelling, ran the end of his crucified nose into the ground.
+In another moment every fighter in Ahmoo's army was busy. Suddenly
+setting up a bawling on his own account Neewa turned tail to the
+nest and ran. Miki was not a hair behind him. In every square inch
+of his tender hide he felt the red-hot thrust of a needle. It was
+Neewa that made the most noise. His voice was one continuous bawl,
+and to this bass Miki's soprano wailing added the touch which
+would have convinced any passing Indian that the loup-garou devils
+were having a dance.
+
+Now that their foes were in disorderly flight the wasps, who are
+rather a chivalrous enemy, would have returned to their upset
+fortress had not Miki, in his mad flight, chosen one side of a
+small sapling and Neewa the other--a misadventure that stopped
+them with a force almost sufficient to break their necks.
+Thereupon a few dozen of Ahmoo's rear guard started in afresh.
+With his fighting blood at last aroused, Neewa swung out and
+caught Miki where there was almost no hair on his rump. Already
+half blinded, and so wrought up with pain and terror that he had
+lost all sense of judgment or understanding, Miki believed that
+the sharp dig of Neewa's razor-like claws was a deeper thrust than
+usual of the buzzing horrors that overwhelmed him, and with a
+final shriek he proceeded to throw a fit.
+
+It was the fit that saved them. In his maniacal contortions he
+swung around to Neewa's side of the sapling, when, with their
+halter once more free from impediment, Neewa bolted for safety.
+Miki followed, yelping at every jump. No longer did Neewa feel a
+horror of the river. The instinct of his kind told him that he
+wanted water, and wanted it badly. As straight as Challoner might
+have set his course by a compass he headed for the stream, but he
+had proceeded only a few hundred feet when they came upon a tiny
+creek across which either of them could have jumped. Neewa jumped
+into the water, which was four or five inches deep, and for the
+first time in his life Miki voluntarily took a plunge. For a long
+time they lay in the cooling rill.
+
+The light of day was dim and hazy before Miki's eyes, and he was
+beginning to swell from the tip of his nose to the end of his bony
+tail. Neewa, being so much fat, suffered less. He could still see,
+and, as the painful hours passed, a number of things were
+adjusting themselves in his brain. All this had begun with the
+man-beast. It was the man-beast who had taken his mother from him.
+It was the man-beast who had chucked him into the dark sack, and
+it was the man-beast who had FASTENED THE ROPE AROUND HIS NECK.
+Slowly the fact was beginning to impinge itself upon him that the
+rope was to blame for everything.
+
+After a long time they dragged themselves out of the rivulet and
+found a soft, dry hollow at the foot of a big tree. Even to Neewa,
+who had the use of his eyes, it was growing dark in the deep
+forest. The sun was far in the west. And the air was growing
+chilly. Flat on his belly, with his swollen head between his fore
+paws, Miki whined plaintively.
+
+Again and again Neewa's eyes went to the rope as the big thought
+developed itself in his head. He whined. It was partly a yearning
+for his mother, partly a response to Miki. He drew closer to the
+pup, filled with the irresistible desire for comradeship. After
+all, it was not Miki who was to blame. It was the man-beast--and
+THE ROPE!
+
+The gloom of evening settled more darkly about them, and snuggling
+himself still closer to the pup Neewa drew the rope between his
+fore paws. With a little snarl he set his teeth in it. And then,
+steadily, he began to chew. Now and then he growled, and in the
+growl there was a peculiarly communicative note, as if he wished
+to say to Miki:
+
+"Don't you see?--I'm chewing this thing in two. I'll have it done
+by morning. Cheer up! There's surely a better day coming."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+
+The morning after their painful experience with the wasp's nest,
+Neewa and Miki rose on four pairs of stiff and swollen legs to
+greet a new day in the deep and mysterious forest into which the
+accident of the previous day had thrown them. The spirit of
+irrepressible youth was upon them, and, though Miki was so swollen
+from the stings of the wasps that his lank body and overgrown legs
+were more grotesque than ever, he was in no way daunted from the
+quest of further adventure.
+
+The pup's face was as round as a moon, and his head was puffed up
+until Neewa might reasonably have had a suspicion that it was on
+the point of exploding. But Miki's eyes--as much as could be seen
+of them--were as bright as ever, and his one good ear and his one
+half ear stood up hopefully as he waited for the cub to give some
+sign of what they were going to do. The poison in his system no
+longer gave him discomfort. He felt several sizes too large--but,
+otherwise, quite well.
+
+Neewa, because of his fat, exhibited fewer effects of his battle
+with the wasps. His one outstanding defect was an entirely closed
+eye. With the other, wide open and alert, he looked about him. In
+spite of his one bad eye and his stiff legs he was inspired with
+the optimism of one who at last sees fortune turning his way. He
+was rid of the man-beast, who had killed his mother; the forests
+were before him again, open and inviting, and the rope with which
+Challoner had tied him and Miki together he had successfully
+gnawed in two during the night. Having dispossessed himself of at
+least two evils it would not have surprised him much if he had
+seen Noozak, his mother, coming up from out of the shadows of the
+trees. Thought of her made him whine. And Miki, facing the vast
+loneliness of his new world, and thinking of his master, whined in
+reply.
+
+Both were hungry. The amazing swiftness with which their
+misfortunes had descended upon them had given them no time in
+which to eat. To Miki the change was more than astonishing; it was
+overwhelming, and he held his breath in anticipation of some new
+evil while Neewa scanned the forest about them.
+
+As if assured by this survey that everything was right, Neewa
+turned his back to the sun, which had been his mother's custom,
+and set out.
+
+Miki followed. Not until then did he discover that every joint in
+his body had apparently disappeared. His neck was stiff, his legs
+were like stilts, and five times in as many minutes he stubbed his
+clumsy toes and fell down in his efforts to keep up with the cub.
+On top of this his eyes were so nearly closed that his vision was
+bad, and the fifth time he stumbled he lost sight of Neewa
+entirely, and sent out a protesting wail. Neewa stopped and began
+prodding with his nose under a rotten log. When Miki came up Neewa
+was flat on his belly, licking up a colony of big red vinegar ants
+as fast as he could catch them. Miki studied the proceeding for
+some moments. It soon dawned upon him that Neewa was eating
+something, but for the life of him he couldn't make out what it
+was. Hungrily he nosed close to Neewa's foraging snout. He licked
+with his tongue where Neewa licked, and he got only dirt. And all
+the time Neewa was giving his jolly little grunts of satisfaction.
+It was ten minutes before he hunted out the last ant and went on.
+
+A little later they came to a small open space where the ground
+was wet, and after sniffing about a bit, and focussing his one
+good eye here and there, Neewa suddenly began digging. Very
+shortly he drew out of the ground a white object about the size of
+a man's thumb and began to crunch it ravenously between his jaws.
+Miki succeeded in capturing a fair sized bit of it. Disappointment
+followed fast. The thing was like wood; after rolling it in his
+mouth a few times he dropped it in disgust, and Neewa finished the
+remnant of the root with a thankful grunt.
+
+They proceeded. For two heartbreaking hours Miki followed at
+Neewa's heels, the void in his stomach increasing as the swelling
+in his body diminished. His hunger was becoming a torture. Yet not
+a bit to eat could he find, while Neewa at every few steps
+apparently discovered something to devour. At the end of the two
+hours the cub's bill of fare had grown to considerable
+proportions. It included, among other things, half a dozen green
+and black beetles; numberless bugs, both hard and soft; whole
+colonies of red and black ants; several white grubs dug out of the
+heart of decaying logs; a handful of snails; a young frog; the egg
+of a ground-plover that had failed to hatch; and, in the vegetable
+line, the roots of two camas and one skunk cabbage. Now and then
+he pulled down tender poplar shoots and nipped the ends off.
+Likewise he nibbled spruce and balsam gum whenever he found it,
+and occasionally added to his breakfast a bit of tender grass.
+
+A number of these things Miki tried. He would have eaten the frog,
+but Neewa was ahead of him there. The spruce and balsam gum
+clogged up his teeth and almost made him vomit because of its
+bitterness. Between a snail and a stone he could find little
+difference, and as the one bug he tried happened to be that
+asafoetida-like creature known as a stink-bug he made no further
+efforts in that direction. He also bit off a tender tip from a
+ground-shoot, but instead of a young poplar it was Fox-bite, and
+shrivelled up his tongue for a quarter of an hour. At last he
+arrived at the conclusion that, up to date, the one thing in
+Neewa's menu that he COULD eat was grass.
+
+In the face of his own starvation his companion grew happier as he
+added to the strange collection in his stomach. In fact, Neewa
+considered himself in clover and was grunting his satisfaction
+continually, especially as his bad eye was beginning to open and
+he could see things better. Half a dozen times when he found fresh
+ant nests he invited Miki to the feast with excited little
+squeals. Until noon Miki followed like a faithful satellite at his
+heels. The end came when Neewa deliberately dug into a nest
+inhabited by four huge bumble-bees, smashed them all, and ate
+them.
+
+From that moment something impressed upon Miki that he must do his
+own hunting. With the thought came a new thrill. His eyes were
+fairly open now, and much of the stiffness had gone from his legs.
+The blood of his Mackenzie father and of his half Spitz and half
+Airedale mother rose up in him in swift and immediate demand, and
+he began to quest about for himself. He found a warm scent, and
+poked about until a partridge went up with a tremendous thunder of
+wings. It startled him, but added to the thrill. A few minutes
+later, nosing under a pile of brush, he came face to face with his
+dinner.
+
+It was Wahboo, the baby rabbit. Instantly Miki was at him, and had
+a firm hold at the back of Wahboo's back. Neewa, hearing the
+smashing of the brush and the squealing of the rabbit, stopped
+catching ants and hustled toward the scene of action. The
+squealing ceased quickly and Miki backed himself out and faced
+Neewa with Wahboo held triumphantly in his jaws. The young rabbit
+had already given his last kick, and with a fierce show of
+growling Miki began tearing the fur off. Neewa edged in, grunting
+affably. Miki snarled more fiercely. Neewa, undaunted, continued
+to express his overwhelming regard for Miki in low and
+supplicating grunts--and smelled the rabbit. The snarl in Miki's
+throat died away. He may have remembered that Neewa had invited
+him more than once to partake of his ants and bugs. Together they
+ate the rabbit. Not until the last bit of flesh and the last
+tender bone were gone did the feast end, and then Neewa sat back
+on his round bottom and stuck out his little red tongue for the
+first time since he had lost his mother. It was the cub sign of a
+full stomach and a blissful mind. He could see nothing to be more
+desired at the present time than a nap, and stretching himself
+languidly he began looking about for a tree.
+
+Miki, on the other hand, was inspired to new action by the
+pleasurable sensation of being comfortably filled. Inasmuch as
+Neewa chewed his food very carefully, while Miki, paying small
+attention to mastication, swallowed it in chunks, the pup had
+succeeded in getting away with about four fifths of the rabbit. So
+he was no longer hungry. But he was more keenly alive to his
+changed environment than at any time since he and Neewa had fallen
+out of Challoner's canoe into the rapids. For the first time he
+had killed, and for the first time he had tasted warm blood, and
+the combination added to his existence an excitement that was
+greater than any desire he might have possessed to lie down in a
+sunny spot and sleep. Now that he had learned the game, the
+hunting instinct trembled in every fibre of his small being. He
+would have gone on hunting until his legs gave way under him if
+Neewa had not found a napping-place.
+
+Astonished half out of his wits he watched Neewa as he leisurely
+climbed the trunk of a big poplar. He had seen squirrels climb
+trees--just as he had seen birds fly--but Neewa's performance held
+him breathless; and not until the cub had stretched himself out
+comfortably in a crotch did Miki express himself. Then he gave an
+incredulous yelp, sniffed at the butt of the tree, and made a
+half-hearted experiment at the thing himself. One flop on his back
+convinced him that Neewa was the tree-climber of the partnership.
+Chagrined, he wandered back fifteen or twenty feet and sat down to
+study the situation. He could not perceive that Neewa had any
+special business up the tree. Certainly he was not hunting for
+bugs. He yelped half a dozen times, but Neewa made no answer. At
+last he gave it up and flopped himself down with a disconsolate
+whine.
+
+But it was not to sleep. He was ready and anxious to go on. He
+wanted to explore still further the mysterious and fascinating
+depths of the forest. He no longer felt the strange fear that had
+been upon him before he killed the rabbit. In two minutes under
+the brush-heap Nature had performed one of her miracles of
+education. In those two minutes Miki had risen out of whimpering
+puppyhood to new power and understanding. He had passed that
+elemental stage which his companionship with Challoner had
+prolonged. He had KILLED, and the hot thrill of it set fire to
+every instinct that was in him. In the half hour during which he
+lay flat on his belly, his head alert and listening, while Neewa
+slept, he passed half way from puppyhood to dogdom. He would never
+know that Hela, his Mackenzie hound father, was the mightiest
+hunter in all the reaches of the Little Fox country, and that
+alone he had torn down a bull caribou. But he FELT it. There was
+something insistent and demanding in the call. And because he was
+answering that call, and listening eagerly to the whispering
+voices of the forest, his quick ears caught the low, chuckling
+monotone of Kawook, the porcupine.
+
+Miki lay very still. A moment later he heard the soft clicking of
+quills, and then Kawook came out in the open and stood up on his
+hind feet in a patch of sunlight.
+
+For thirteen years Kawook had lived undisturbed in this particular
+part of the wilderness, and in his old age he weighed thirty
+pounds if he weighed an ounce. On this afternoon, coming for his
+late dinner, he was feeling even more than usually happy. His
+eyesight at best was dim. Nature had never intended him to see
+very far, and had therefore quilted him heavily with the barbed
+shafts of his protecting armour. Thirty feet away he was entirely
+oblivious of Miki, at least apparently so; and Miki hugged the
+ground closer, warned by the swiftly developing instinct within
+him that here was a creature it would be unwise to attack.
+
+For perhaps a minute Kawook stood up, chuckling his tribal song
+without any visible movement of his body. He stood profile to
+Miki, like a fat alderman. He was so fat that his stomach bulged
+out in front like the half of a balloon, and over this stomach his
+hands were folded in a peculiarly human way, so that he looked
+more like an old she-porcupine than a master in his tribe.
+
+It was not until then that Miki observed Iskwasis, the young
+female porcupine, who had poked herself slyly out from under a
+bush near Kawook. In spite of his years the red thrill of romance
+was not yet gone from the old fellow's bones, and he immediately
+started to give an exhibition of his good breeding and elegance.
+He began with his ludicrous love-making dance, hopping from one
+foot to the other until his fat stomach shook, and chuckling
+louder than ever. The charms of Iskwasis were indeed sufficient to
+turn the head of an older beau than Kawook. She was a distinctive
+blonde; in other words, one of those unusual creatures of her
+kind, an albino. Her nose was pink, the palms of her little feet
+were pink, and each of her pretty pink eyes was set in an iris of
+sky-blue. It was evident that she did not regard old Kawook's
+passion-dance with favour and sensing this fact Kawook changed his
+tactics and falling on all four feet began to chase his spiky tail
+as if he had suddenly gone mad. When he stopped, and looked to see
+what effect he had made he was clearly knocked out by the fact
+that Iskwasis had disappeared.
+
+For another minute he sat stupidly, without making a sound. Then
+to Miki's consternation he started straight for the tree in which
+Neewa was sleeping. As a matter of fact, it was Kawook's dinner-
+tree, and he began climbing it, talking to himself all the time.
+Miki's hair began to stand on end. He did not know that Kawook,
+like all his kind, was the best-natured fellow in the world, and
+had never harmed anything in his life unless assaulted first.
+Lacking this knowledge he set up a sudden frenzy of barking to
+warn Neewa.
+
+Neewa roused himself slowly, and when he opened his eyes he was
+looking into a spiky face that sent him into a convulsion of
+alarm. With a suddenness that came within an ace of toppling him
+from his crotch he swung over and scurried higher up the tree.
+Kawook was not at all excited. Now that Iskwasis was gone he was
+entirely absorbed in the anticipation of his dinner. He continued
+to clamber slowly upward, and at this the horrified Neewa backed
+himself out on a limb in order that Kawook might have an
+unobstructed trail up the tree.
+
+Unfortunately for Neewa it was on this limb that Kawook had eaten
+his last meal, and he began working himself out on it, still
+apparently oblivious of the fact that the cub was on the same
+branch. At this Miki sent up such a series of shrieking yelps from
+below that Kawook seemed at last to realize that something unusual
+was going on. He peered down at Miki who was making vain efforts
+to jump up the trunk of the tree; then he turned and, for the
+first time, contemplated Neewa with some sign of interest. Neewa
+was hugging the limb with both forearms and both hind legs. To
+retreat another foot on the branch that was already bending
+dangerously under his weight seemed impossible.
+
+It was at this point that Kawook began to scold fiercely. With a
+final frantic yelp Miki sat back on his haunches and watched the
+thrilling drama above him. A little at a time Kawook advanced, and
+inch by inch Neewa retreated, until at last he rolled clean over
+and was hanging with his back toward the ground. It was then that
+Kawook ceased his scolding and calmly began eating his dinner. For
+two or three minutes Neewa kept his hold. Twice he made efforts to
+pull himself up so that he could get the branch under him. Then
+his hind feet slipped. For a dozen seconds he hung with his two
+front paws--then shot down through fifteen feet of space to the
+ground. Close to Miki he landed with a thud that knocked the wind
+out of him. He rose with a grunt, took one dazed look up the tree,
+and without further explanation to Miki began to leg it deeper
+into the forest--straight into the face of the great adventure
+which was to be the final test for these two.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+
+Not until he had covered at least a quarter of a mile did Neewa
+stop. To Miki it seemed as though they had come suddenly out of
+day into the gloom of evening. That part of the forest into which
+Neewa's flight had led them was like a vast, mysterious cavern.
+Even Challoner would have paused there, awed by the grandeur of
+its silence, held spellbound by the enigmatical whispers that made
+up its only sound. The sun was still high in the heavens, but not
+a ray of it penetrated the dense green canopy of spruce and balsam
+that hung like a wall over the heads of Miki and Neewa. About them
+was no bush, no undergrowth; under their feet was not a flower or
+a spear of grass. Nothing but a thick, soft carpet of velvety
+brown needles under which all life was smothered. It was as if the
+forest nymphs had made of this their bedchamber, sheltered through
+all the seasons of the year from wind and rain and snow; or else
+that the were-wolf people--the loup-garou--had chosen it as their
+hiding-place and from its weird and gloomy fastnesses went forth
+on their ghostly missions among the sons of men.
+
+Not a bird twittered in the trees. There was no flutter of life in
+their crowded branches. Everything was so still that Miki heard
+the excited throbbing of life in his own body. He looked at Neewa,
+and in the gloom the cub's eyes were glistening with a strange
+fire. Neither of them was afraid, yet in that cavernous silence
+their comradeship was born anew, and in it there was something now
+that crept down into their wild little souls and filled the
+emptiness that was left by the death of Neewa's mother and the
+loss of Miki's master. The pup whined gently, and in his throat
+Neewa made a purring sound and followed it with a squeaky grunt
+that was like the grunt of a little pig. They edged nearer, and
+stood shoulder to shoulder facing their world. They went on after
+a little, like two children exploring the mystery of an old and
+abandoned house. They were not hunting, yet every hunting instinct
+in their bodies was awake, and they stopped frequently to peer
+about them, and listen, and scent the air.
+
+To Neewa it all brought back a memory of the black cavern in which
+he was born. Would Noozak, his mother, come up presently out of
+one of those dark forest aisles? Was she sleeping here, as she had
+slept in the darkness of their den? The questions may have come
+vaguely in his mind. For it was like the cavern, in that it was
+deathly still; and a short distance away its gloom thickened into
+black pits. Such a place the Indians called MUHNEDOO--a spot in
+the forest blasted of all life by the presence of devils; for only
+devils would grow trees so thick that sunlight never penetrated.
+And only owls held the companionship of the evil spirits.
+
+Where Neewa and Miki stood a grown wolf would have paused, and
+turned back; the fox would have slunk away, hugging the ground;
+even the murderous-hearted little ermine would have peered in with
+his beady red eyes, unafraid, but turned by instinct back into the
+open timber. For here, in spite of the stillness and the gloom,
+THERE WAS LIFE. It was beating and waiting in the ambush of those
+black pits. It was rousing itself, even as Neewa and Miki went on
+deeper into the silence, and eyes that were like round balls were
+beginning to glow with a greenish fire. Still there was no sound,
+no movement in the dense overgrowth of the trees. Like the imps of
+MUHNEDOO the monster owls looked down, gathering their slow wits--
+and waiting.
+
+And then a huge shadow floated out of the dark chaos and passed so
+close over the heads of Neewa and Miki that they heard the
+menacing purr of giant wings. As the wraith-like creature
+disappeared there came back to them a hiss and the grating snap of
+a powerful beak. It sent a shiver through Miki. The instinct that
+had been fighting to rouse itself within him flared up like a
+powder-flash. Instantly he sensed the nearness of an unknown and
+appalling danger.
+
+There was sound about them now--movement in the trees, ghostly
+tremours in the air, and the crackling, metallic SNAP--SNAP--SNAP
+over their heads. Again Miki saw the great shadow come and go. It
+was followed by a second, and a third, until the vault under the
+trees seemed filled with shadows; and with each shadow came nearer
+that grating menace of powerfully beaked jaws. Like the wolf and
+the fox he cringed down, hugging the earth. But it was no longer
+with the whimpering fear of the pup. His muscles were drawn tight,
+and with a snarl he bared his fangs when one of the owls swooped
+so low that he felt the beat of its wings. Neewa responded with a
+sniff that a little later in his life would have been the defiant
+WHOOF of his mother. Bear-like he was standing up. And it was upon
+him that one of the shadows descended--a monstrous feathered bolt
+straight out of darkness.
+
+Six feet away Miki's blazing eyes saw his comrade smothered under
+a gray mass, and for a moment or two he was held appalled and
+lifeless by the thunderous beat of the gargantuan wings. No sound
+came from Neewa. Flung on his back, he was digging his claws into
+feathers so thick and soft that they seemed to have no heart or
+flesh. He felt upon him the presence of the Thing that was death.
+The beat of the wings was like the beat of clubs: they drove the
+breath out of his body, they blinded his senses, yet he continued
+to tear fiercely with his claws into a fleshless breast.
+
+In his first savage swoop Oohoomisew, whose great wings measured
+five feet from tip to tip, had missed his death-grip by the
+fraction of an inch. His powerful talons that would have buried
+themselves like knives in Neewa's vitals closed too soon, and were
+filled with the cub's thick hair and loose hide. Now he was
+beating his prey down with his wings until the right moment came
+for him to finish the killing with the terrific stabbing of his
+beak. Half a minute of that and Neewa's face would be torn into
+pieces.
+
+It was the fact that Neewa made no sound, that no cry came from
+him, that brought Miki to his feet with his lips drawn back and a
+snarl in his throat. All at once fear went out of him and in its
+place came a wild and almost joyous exultation. He recognized
+their enemy--A BIRD. To him birds were a prey, and not a menace. A
+dozen times in their journey down from the Upper Country Challoner
+had shot big Canada geese and huge-winged cranes. Miki had eaten
+their flesh. Twice he had pursued wounded cranes, yapping at the
+top of his voice, AND THEY HAD RUN FROM HIM. He did not bark or
+yelp now. Like a flash he launched himself into the feathered mass
+of the owl. His fourteen pounds of flesh and bone landed with the
+force of a stone, and Oohoomisew was torn from his hold and flung
+with a great flutter of wings upon his side.
+
+Before he could recover his balance Miki was at him again,
+striking full at his head, where he had struck at the wounded
+crane. Oohoomisew went flat on his back--and for the first time
+Miki let out of his throat a series of savage and snarling yelps.
+It was a new sound to Oohoomisew and his blood-thirsty brethren
+watching the struggle from out of the gloom. The snapping beaks
+drifted farther away, and Oohoomisew, with a, sudden sweep of
+wings, vaulted into the air.
+
+With his big forefeet planted firmly and his snarling face turned
+up to the black wall of the tree-tops Miki continued to bark and
+howl defiantly. He wanted the bird to come back. He wanted to tear
+and rip at its feathers, and as he sent out his frantic challenge
+Neewa rolled over, got on his feet, and with a warning squeal to
+Miki once more set off in flight. If Miki was ignorant in the
+matter, HE at least understood the situation. Again it was the
+instinct born of countless generations. He knew that in the black
+pits about them hovered death--and he ran as he had never run
+before in his life. As Miki followed, the shadows were beginning
+to float nearer again.
+
+Ahead of them they saw a glimmer of sunshine. The trees grew
+taller, and soon the day began breaking through so that there were
+no longer the cavernous hollows of gloom about them. If they had
+gone on another hundred yards they would have come to the edge of
+the big plain, the hunting grounds of the owls. But the flame of
+self-preservation was hot in Neewa's head; he was still dazed by
+the thunderous beat of wings; his sides burned where Oohoomisew's
+talons had scarred his flesh; so, when he saw in his path a
+tangled windfall of tree trunks he dived into the security of it
+so swiftly that for a moment or two Miki wondered where he had
+gone.
+
+Crawling into the windfall after him Miki turned and poked out his
+head. He was not satisfied. His lips were still drawn back, and he
+continued to growl. He had beaten his enemy. He had knocked it
+over fairly, and had filled his jaws with its feathers. In the
+face of that triumph he sensed the fact that he had run away in
+following Neewa, and he was possessed with the desire to go back
+and have it out to a finish. It was the blood of the Airedale and
+the Spitz growing stronger in him, fearless of defeat; the blood
+of his father, the giant hunting-hound Hela. It was the demand of
+his breed, with its mixture of wolfish courage and fox-like
+persistency backed by the powerful jaws and Herculean strength of
+the Mackenzie hound, and if Neewa had not drawn deeper under the
+windfall he would have gone out again and yelped his challenge to
+the feathered things from which they had fled.
+
+Neewa was smarting under the red-hot stab of Oohoomisew's talons,
+and he wanted no more of the fight that came out of the air. He
+began licking his wounds, and after a while Miki went back to him
+and smelled of the fresh, warm blood. It made him growl. He knew
+that it was Neewa's blood, and his eyes glowed like twin balls of
+fire as they watched the opening through which they had entered
+into the dark tangle of fallen trees.
+
+For an hour he did not move, and in that hour, as in the hour
+after the killing of the rabbit, he GREW. When at last he crept
+out cautiously from under the windfall the sun was sinking behind
+the western forests. He peered about him, watching for movement
+and listening for sound. The sagging and apologetic posture of
+puppyhood was gone from him. His overgrown feet stood squarely on
+the ground; his angular legs were as hard as if carven out of
+knotty wood; his body was tense, his ears stood up, his head was
+rigidly set between the bony shoulders that already gave evidence
+of gigantic strength to come. About him he knew was the Big
+Adventure. The world was no longer a world of play and of
+snuggling under the hands of a master. Something vastly more
+thrilling had come into it now.
+
+After a time he dropped on his belly close to the opening under
+the windfall and began chewing at the end of rope which dragged
+from about his neck. The sun sank lower. It disappeared. Still he
+waited for Neewa to come out and lie with him in the open. As the
+twilight thickened into deeper gloom he drew himself into the edge
+of the door under the windfall and found Neewa there. Together
+they peered forth into the mysterious night.
+
+For a time there was the utter stillness of the first hour of
+darkness in the northland. Up in the clear sky the stars came out
+in twos and then in glowing constellations. There was an early
+moon. It was already over the edge of the forests, flooding the
+world with a golden glow, and in that glow the night was filled
+with grotesque black shadows that had neither movement nor sound.
+Then the silence was broken. From out of the owl-infested pits
+came a strange and hollow sound. Miki had heard the shrill
+screeching and the TU-WHO-O-O, TU-WHO-O-O, TU-WHO-O-O of the
+little owls, the trap-pirates, but never this voice of the strong-
+winged Jezebels and Frankensteins of the deeper forests--the real
+butchers of the night. It was a hollow, throaty sound--more a moan
+than a cry; a moan so short and low that it seemed born of
+caution, or of fear that it would frighten possible prey. For a
+few minutes pit after pit gave forth each its signal of life, and
+then there was a silence of voice, broken at intervals by the
+faint, crashing sweep of great wings in the spruce and balsam tops
+as the hunters launched themselves up and over them in the
+direction of the plain.
+
+The going forth of the owls was only the beginning of the night
+carnival for Neewa and Miki. For a long time they lay side by
+side, sleepless, and listening. Past the windfall went the padded
+feet of a fisher-cat, and they caught the scent of it; to them
+came the far cry of a loon, the yapping of a restless fox, and the
+MOOING of a cow moose feeding in the edge of a lake on the farther
+side of the plain. And then, at last, came the thing that made
+their blood run faster and sent a deeper thrill into their hearts.
+
+It seemed a vast distance away at first--the hot throated cry of
+wolves on the trail of meat. It was swinging northward into the
+plain, and this shortly brought the cry with the wind, which was
+out of the north and the west. The howling of the pack was very
+distinct after that, and in Miki's brain nebulous visions and
+almost unintelligible memories were swiftly wakening into life. It
+was not Challoner's voice that he heard, but it was A VOICE THAT
+HE KNEW. It was the voice of Hela, his giant father; the voice of
+Numa, his mother; the voice of his kind for a hundred and a
+thousand generations before him, and it was the instinct of those
+generations and the hazy memory of his earliest puppyhood that
+were impinging the thing upon him. A little later it would take
+both intelligence and experience to make him discriminate the
+hair-breadth difference between wolf and dog. And this voice of
+his blood was COMING! It bore down upon them swiftly, fierce and
+filled with the blood-lust of hunger. He forgot Neewa. He did not
+observe the cub when he slunk back deeper under the windfall. He
+rose up on his feet and stood stiff and tense, unconscious of all
+things but that thrilling tongue of the hunt-pack.
+
+Wind-broken, his strength failing him, and his eyes wildly
+searching the night ahead for the gleam of water that might save
+him, Ahtik, the young caribou bull, raced for his life a hundred
+yards ahead of the wolves. The pack had already flung itself out
+in the form of a horse-shoe, and the two ends were beginning to
+creep up abreast of Ahtik, ready to close in for the hamstring--
+and the kill. In these last minutes every throat was silent, and
+the young bull sensed the beginning of the end. Desperately he
+turned to the right and plunged into the forest.
+
+Miki heard the crash of his body and he hugged close to the
+windfall. Ten seconds later Ahtik passed within fifty feet of him,
+a huge and grotesque form in the moonlight, his coughing breath
+filled with the agony and hopelessness of approaching death. As
+swiftly as he had come he was gone, and in his place followed half
+a score of noiseless shadows passing so quickly that to Miki they
+were like the coming and the going of the wind.
+
+For many minutes after that he stood and listened but again
+silence had fallen upon the night. After a little he went back
+into the windfall and lay down beside Neewa.
+
+Hours that followed he passed in restless snatches of slumber. He
+dreamed of things that he had forgotten. He dreamed of Challoner.
+He dreamed of chill nights and the big fires; he heard his
+master's voice and he felt again the touch of his hand; but over
+it all and through it all ran that wild hunting voice of his own
+kind.
+
+In the early dawn he came out from under the windfall and smelled
+of the trail where the wolves and the caribou had passed.
+Heretofore it was Neewa who had led in their wandering; now it was
+Neewa that followed. His nostrils filled with the heavy scent of
+the pack, Miki travelled steadily in the direction of the plain.
+It took him half an hour to reach the edge of it. After that he
+came to a wide and stony out-cropping of the earth over which he
+nosed the spoor to a low and abrupt descent into the wider range
+of the valley.
+
+Here he stopped.
+
+Twenty feet under him and fifty feet away lay the partly devoured
+carcass of the young bull. It was not this fact that thrilled him
+until his heart stood still. From out of the bushy plain had come
+Maheegun, a renegade she-wolf, to fill herself of the meat which
+she had not helped to kill. She was a slinking, hollow-backed,
+quick-fanged creature, still rib-thin from the sickness that had
+come of eating a poison-bait; a beast shunned by her own kind--a
+coward, a murderess even of her own whelps. But she was none of
+these things to Miki. In her he saw in living flesh and bone what
+his memory and his instinct recalled to him of his mother. And his
+mother had come before Challoner, his master.
+
+For a minute or two he lay trembling, and then he went down, as he
+would have gone to Challoner; with great caution, with a wilder
+suspense, but with a strange yearning within him that the man's
+presence would have failed to rouse. He was very close to Maheegun
+before she was conscious that he was near. The Mother-smell was
+warm in his nose now; it filled him with a great joy; and yet--he
+was afraid. But it was not a physical fear. Flattened on the
+ground, with his head between his fore-paws, he whined.
+
+Like a flash the she-wolf turned, her fangs bared the length of
+her jaws and her bloodshot eyes aglow with menace and suspicion.
+Miki had no time to make a move or another sound. With the
+suddenness of a cat the outcast creature was upon him. Her fangs
+slashed him just once--and she was gone. Her teeth had drawn blood
+from his shoulder, but it was not the smart of the wound that held
+him for many moments as still as if dead. The Mother-smell was
+still where Maheegun had been. But his dreams had crumbled. The
+thing that had been Memory died away at last in a deep breath that
+was broken by a whimper of pain. For him, even as for Neewa, there
+was no more a Challoner, and no longer a mother. But there
+remained--the world! In it the sun was rising. Out of it came the
+thrill and the perfume of life. And close to him--very close--was
+the rich, sweet smell of meat.
+
+He sniffed hungrily. Then he turned, and saw Neewa's black and
+pudgy body tumbling down the slope of the dip to join him in the
+feast.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+
+Had Makoki, the leather-faced old Cree runner between God's Lake
+and Fort Churchill, known the history of Miki and Neewa up to the
+point where they came to feast on the fat and partly devoured
+carcass of the young caribou bull, he would have said that Iskoo
+Wapoo, the Good Spirit of the beasts, was watching over them most
+carefully. For Makoki had great faith in the forest gods as well
+as in those of his own tepee. He would have given the story his
+own picturesque version, and would have told it to the little
+children of his son's children; and his son's children would have
+kept it in their memory for their own children later on.
+
+It was not in the ordained nature of things that a black bear cub
+and a Mackenzie hound pup with a dash of Airedale and Spitz in him
+should "chum up" together as Neewa and Miki had done. Therefore,
+he would have said, the Beneficent Spirit who watched over the
+affairs of four-legged beasts must have had an eye on them from
+the beginning. It was she--Iskoo Wapoo was a goddess and not a god
+--who had made Challoner kill Neewa's mother, the big black bear;
+and it was she who had induced him to tie the pup and the cub
+together on the same piece of rope, so that when they fell out of
+the white man's canoe into the rapids they would not die, but
+would be company and salvation for each other. NESWA-PAWUK ("two
+little brothers") Makoki would have called them; and had it come
+to the test he would have cut off a finger before harming either
+of them. But Makoki knew nothing of their adventures, and on this
+morning when they came down to the feast he was a hundred miles
+away, haggling with a white man who wanted a guide. He would never
+know that Iskoo Wapoo was at his side that very moment, planning
+the thing that was to mean so much in the lives of Neewa and Miki.
+
+Meanwhile Neewa and Miki went at their breakfast as if starved.
+They were immensely practical. They did not look back on what had
+happened, but for the moment submerged themselves completely in
+the present. The few days of thrill and adventure through which
+they had gone seemed like a year. Neewa's yearning for his mother
+had grown less and less insistent, and Miki's lost master counted
+for nothing now, as things were going with him. Last night was the
+big, vivid thing in their memories--their fight for life with the
+monster owls, their flight, the killing of the young caribou bull
+by the wolves, and (with Miki) the short, bitter experience with
+Maheegun, the renegade she-wolf. His shoulder burned where she had
+torn at him with her teeth. But this did not lessen his appetite.
+Growling as he ate, he filled himself until he could hold no more.
+
+Then he sat back on his haunches and looked in the direction
+Maheegun had taken.
+
+It was eastward, toward Hudson Bay, over a great plain that lay
+between two ridges that were like forest walls, yellow and gold in
+the morning sun. He had never seen the world as it looked to him
+now. The wolves had overtaken the caribou on a scarp on the high
+ground that thrust itself out like a short fat thumb from the
+black and owl-infested forest, and the carcass lay in a meadowy
+dip that overhung the plain. From the edge of this dip Miki could
+look down--and so far away that the wonder of what he saw
+dissolved itself at last into the shimmer of the sun and the blue
+of the sky. Within his vision lay a paradise of marvellous
+promise; wide stretches of soft, green meadow; clumps of timber,
+park-like until they merged into the deeper forest that began with
+the farther ridge; great patches of bush radiant with the
+colouring of June; here and there the gleam of water, and half a
+mile away a lake that was like a giant mirror set in a purplish-
+green frame of balsam and spruce.
+
+Into these things Maheegun, the she-wolf, had gone. He wondered
+whether she would come back. He sniffed the air for her. But there
+was no longer the mother-yearning in his heart. Something had
+already begun to tell him of the vast difference between the dog
+and the wolf. For a few moments, still hopeful that the world held
+a mother for him, he had mistaken her for the one he had lost. But
+he understood now. A little more and Maheegun's teeth would have
+snapped his shoulder, or slashed his throat to the jugular. TEBAH-
+GONE-GAWIN (the One Great Law) was impinging itself upon him, the
+implacable law of the survival of the fittest. To live was to
+fight--to kill; to beat everything that had feet or wings. The
+earth and the air held menace for him. Nowhere, since he had lost
+Challoner, had he found friendship except in the heart of Neewa,
+the motherless cub. And he turned toward Neewa now, growling at a
+gay-plumaged moose-bird that was hovering about for a morsel of
+meat.
+
+A few minutes before, Neewa had weighed a dozen pounds; now he
+weighed fourteen or fifteen. His stomach was puffed out like the
+sides of an overfilled bag, and he sat humped up in a pool of warm
+sunshine licking his chops and vastly contented with himself and
+the world. Miki rubbed up to him, and Neewa gave a chummy grunt.
+Then he rolled over on his fat back and invited Miki to play. It
+was the first time; and with a joyous yelp Miki jumped into him.
+Scratching and biting and kicking, and interjecting their friendly
+scrimmage with ferocious growling on Miki's part and pig-like
+grunts and squeals on Neewa's, they rolled to the edge of the dip.
+It was a good hundred feet to the bottom--a steep, grassy slope
+that ran to the plain--and like two balls they catapulted the
+length of it. For Neewa it was not so bad. He was round and fat,
+and went easily.
+
+With Miki it was different. He was all legs and skin and angular
+bone, and he went down twisting and somersaulting and tying
+himself into knots until by the time he struck the hard strip of
+shale at the edge of the plain he was drunk with dizziness and the
+breath was out of his body. He staggered to his feet with a gasp.
+For a space the world was whirling round and round in a sickening
+circle. Then he pulled himself together, and made out Neewa a
+dozen feet away.
+
+Neewa was just awakening to the truth of an exhilarating
+discovery. Next to a boy on a sled, or a beaver on its tail, no
+one enjoys a "slide" more than a black bear cub, and as Miki
+rearranged his scattered wits Neewa climbed twenty or thirty feet
+up the slope and deliberately rolled down again! Miki's jaws fell
+apart in amazement. Again Neewa climbed up and rolled down--and
+Miki ceased to breathe altogether. Five times he watched Neewa go
+that twenty or thirty feet up the grassy slope and tumble down.
+The fifth time he waded into Neewa and gave him a rough-and-tumble
+that almost ended in a fight.
+
+After that Miki began exploring along the foot of the slope, and
+for a scant hundred yards Neewa humoured him by following, but
+beyond that point he flatly refused to go. In the fourth month of
+his exciting young life Neewa was satisfied that Nature had given
+him birth that he might have the endless pleasure of filling his
+stomach. For him, eating was the one and only excuse for existing.
+In the next few months he had a big job on his hands if he kept up
+the record of his family, and the fact that Miki was apparently
+abandoning the fat and juicy carcass of the young bull filled him
+with alarm and rebellion. Straightway he forgot all thought of
+play and started back up the slope on a mission that was 100 per
+cent. business.
+
+Observing this, Miki gave up his idea of exploration and joined
+him. They reached the shelf of the dip twenty yards from the
+carcass of the bull, and from a clutter of big stones looked forth
+upon their meat. In that moment they stood dumb and paralyzed. Two
+gigantic owls were tearing at the carcass. To Miki and Neewa these
+were the monsters of the black forest out of which they had
+escaped so narrowly with their lives. But as a matter of fact they
+were not of Oohoomisew's breed of night-seeing pirates. They were
+Snowy Owls, unlike all others of their kind in that their vision
+was as keen as a hawk's in the light of broad day. Mispoon, the
+big male, was immaculately white. His mate, a size or two smaller,
+was barred with brownish-slate colour--and their heads were round
+and terrible looking because they had no ear-tufts. Mispoon, with
+his splendid wings spread half over the carcass of Ahtik, the dead
+bull, was rending flesh so ravenously with his powerful beak that
+Neewa and Miki could hear the sound of it. Newish, his mate, had
+her head almost buried in Ahtik's bowels. The sight of them and
+the sound of their eating were enough to disturb the nerves of an
+older bear than Neewa, and he crouched behind a stone, with just
+his head sticking out.
+
+In Miki's throat was a sullen growl. But he held it back, and
+flattened himself on the ground. The blood of the giant hunter
+that was his father rose in him again like fire. The carcass was
+his meat, and he was ready to fight for it. Besides, had he not
+whipped the big owl in the forest? But here there were two. The
+fact held him flattened on his belly a moment or two longer, and
+in that brief space the unexpected happened.
+
+Slinking up out of the low growth of bush at the far edge of the
+dip lie saw Maheegun, the renegade she-wolf. Hollow-backed, red-
+eyed, her bushy tail hanging with the sneaky droop of the
+murderess, she advanced over the bit of open, a gray and vengeful
+shadow. Furtive as she was, she at least acted with great
+swiftness. Straight at Mispoon she launched herself with a snarl
+and snap of fangs that made Miki hug the ground still closer.
+
+Deep into Mispoon's four-inch armour of feathers Maheegun buried
+her fangs. Taken at a disadvantage Mispoon's head would have been
+torn from his body before he could have gathered himself for
+battle had it not been for Newish. Pulling her blood stained head
+from Ahtik's flesh and blood she drove at Maheegun with a throaty,
+wheezing scream--a cry that was like the cry of no other thing
+that lived. Into the she-wolf's back she sank her beak and talons
+and Maheegun gave up her grip on Mispoon and tore ferociously at
+her new assailant. For a space Mispoon was saved, but it was at a
+terrible sacrifice to Newish. With a single lucky slash of her
+long-fanged jaws, Maheegun literally tore one of Newish's great
+wings from her body. The croak of agony that came out of her may
+have held the death-note for Mispoon, her mate; for he rose on his
+wings, poised himself for an instant, and launched himself at the
+she-wolf's back with a force that drove Maheegun off her feet.
+
+Deep into her loins the great owl sank his talons, gripping at the
+renegade's vitals with an avenging and ferocious tenacity. In that
+hold Maheegun felt the sting of death. She flung herself on her
+back; she rolled over and over, snarling and snapping and clawing
+the air in her efforts to free herself of the burning knives that
+were sinking still deeper into her bowels. Mispoon hung on,
+rolling as she rolled, beating with his giant wings, fastening his
+talons in that clutch that death could not shake loose. On the
+ground his mate was dying. Her life's blood was pouring out of the
+hole in her side, but with the dimming vision of death she made a
+last effort to help Mispoon. And Mispoon, a hero to the last, kept
+his grip until he was dead.
+
+Into the edge of the bush Maheegun dragged herself. There she
+freed herself of the big owl. But the deep wounds were still in
+her sides. The blood dripped from her belly as she made her way
+down into the thicker cover, leaving a red trail behind her. A
+quarter of a mile away she lay down under a clump of dwarf spruce;
+and there, a little later, she died.
+
+To Neewa and Miki--and especially to the son of Hela--the grim
+combat had widened even more that subtle and growing comprehension
+of the world as it existed for them. It was the unforgettable
+wisdom of experience backed by an age-old instinct and the
+heredity of breed. They had killed small things--Neewa, his bugs
+and his frogs and his bumble-bees; Miki, his rabbit--they had
+fought for their lives; they had passed through experiences that,
+from the beginning, had been a gamble with death; but it had
+needed the climax of a struggle such as they had seen with their
+own eyes to open up the doors that gave them a new viewpoint of
+life.
+
+It was many minutes before Miki went forth and smelled of Newish,
+the dead owl. He had no desire now to tear at her feathers in the
+excitement of an infantile triumph and ferocity. Along with
+greater understanding a new craft and a new cunning were born in
+him. The fate of Mispoon and his mate had taught him the priceless
+value of silence and of caution, for he knew now that in the world
+there were many things that were not afraid of him, and many
+things that would not run away from him. He had lost his fearless
+and blatant contempt for winged creatures; he had learned that the
+earth was not made for him alone, and that to hold his small place
+on it he must fight as Maheegun and the owls had fought. This was
+because in Miki's veins was the red fighting blood of a long line
+of ancestors that reached back to the wolves.
+
+In Neewa the process of deduction was vastly different. His breed
+was not the fighting breed, except as it fought among its own
+kind. It did not make a habit of preying upon other beasts, and no
+other beast preyed upon it. This was purely an accident of birth--
+the fact that no other creature in all his wide domain was
+powerful enough, either alone or in groups, to defeat a grown
+black bear in open battle. Therefore Neewa learned nothing of
+fighting in the tragedy of Maheegun and the owls. His profit, if
+any, was in a greater caution. And his chief interest was in the
+fact that Maheegun and the two owls had not devoured the young
+bull. His supper was still safe.
+
+With his little round eyes on the alert for fresh trouble he kept
+himself safely hidden while he watched Miki investigating the
+scene of battle. From the body of the owl Miki went to Ahtik, and
+from Ahtik he sniffed slowly over the trail which Maheegun had
+taken into the bush. In the edge of the cover he found Mispoon. He
+did not go farther, but returned to Neewa, who by this time had
+made up his mind that he could safely come out into the open.
+
+Fifty times that day Miki rushed to the defense of their meat. The
+big-eyed, clucking moose-birds were most annoying. Next to them
+the Canada jays were most persistent. Twice a little gray-coated
+ermine, with eyes as red as garnets, came in to get his fill of
+blood. Miki was at him so fiercely that he did not return a third
+time. By noon the crows had got scent or sight of the carcass and
+were circling overhead, waiting for Neewa and Miki to disappear.
+Later, they set up a raucous protest from the tops of the trees in
+the edge of the forest.
+
+That night the wolves did not return to the dip. Meat was too
+plentiful, and those that were over their gorge were off on a
+fresh kill far to the west. Once or twice Neewa and Miki heard
+their distant cry.
+
+Again through a star-filled radiant night they watched and
+listened, and slept at times. In the soft gray dawn they went
+forth once more to their feast.
+
+And here is where Makoki, the old Cree runner, would have
+emphasized the presence of the Beneficent Spirit. For day followed
+day, and night followed night, and Ahtik's flesh and blood put
+into Neewa and Miki a strength and growth that developed
+marvellously. By the fourth day Neewa had become so fat and sleek
+that he was half again as big as on the day he fell out of the
+canoe. Miki had begun to fill out. His ribs could no longer be
+counted from a distance. His chest was broadening and his legs
+were losing some of their angular clumsiness. Practice on Ahtik's
+bones had strengthened his jaws. With his development he felt less
+and less the old puppyish desire to play--more and more the
+restlessness of the hunter. The fourth night he heard again the
+wailing hunt-cry of the wolves, and it held a wild and thrilling
+note for him.
+
+With Neewa, fat and good humour and contentment were all
+synonymous. As long as the meat held out there was no very great
+temptation for him beyond the dip and the slope. Two or three
+times a day he went down to the creek; and every morning and
+afternoon--especially about sunset--he had his fun rolling
+downhill. In addition to this he began taking his afternoon naps
+in the crotch of a small sapling. As Miki could see neither sense
+nor sport in tobogganing, and as he could not climb a tree, he
+began to spend more and more time in venturing up and down the
+foot of the ridge. He wanted Neewa to go with him on these
+expeditions. He never set out until he had entreated Neewa to come
+down out of his tree, or until he had made an effort to coax him
+away from the single trail he had made to the creek and back.
+Neewa's obstinacy would never have brought about any real
+unpleasantness between them. Miki thought too much of him for
+that; and if it had come to a final test, and Neewa had thought
+that Miki would not return, he would undoubtedly have followed
+him.
+
+It was another and a more potent thing than an ordinary quarrel
+that placed the first great barrier between them. Now it happened
+that Miki was of the breed which preferred its meat fresh, while
+Neewa liked his "well hung." And from the fourth day onward, what
+was left of Ahtik's carcass was ripening. On the fifth day Miki
+found the flesh difficult to eat; on the sixth, impossible. To
+Neewa it became increasingly delectable as the flavour grew and
+the perfume thickened. On the sixth day, in sheer delight, he
+rolled in it. That night, for the first time, Miki could not sleep
+with him.
+
+The seventh day brought the climax. Ahtik now fairly smelled to
+heaven. The odour of him drifted up and away on the soft June wind
+until all the crows in the country were gathering. It drove Miki,
+slinking like a whipped cur, down into the creek bottom. When
+Neewa came down for a drink after his morning feast Miki sniffed
+him over for a moment and then slunk away from him again. As a
+matter of fact, there was small difference between Ahtik and Neewa
+now, except that one lay still and the other moved. Both smelled
+dead; both were decidedly "well hung." Even the crows circled over
+Neewa, wondering why it was that he walked about like a living
+thing.
+
+That night Miki slept alone under a clump of bush in the creek
+bottom. He was hungry and lonely, and for the first time in many
+days he felt the bigness and emptiness of the world. He wanted
+Neewa. He whined for him in the starry silence of the long hours
+between sunset and dawn. The sun was well up before Neewa came
+down the hill. He had finished his breakfast and his morning roll,
+and he was worse than ever. Again Miki tried to coax him away but
+Neewa was disgustingly fixed in his determination to remain in his
+present glory. And this morning he was more than usually anxious
+to return to the dip. All of yesterday he had found it necessary
+to frighten the crows away from his meat, and to-day they were
+doubly persistent in their efforts to rob him. With a grunt and a
+squeal to Miki he hustled back up the hill after he had taken his
+drink.
+
+His trail entered the dip through the pile of rocks from which
+Miki and he had watched the battle between Maheegun and the two
+owls, and as a matter of caution he always paused for a few
+moments among these rocks to make sure that all was well in the
+open. This morning he received a decided shock. Ahtik's carcass
+was literally black with crows. Kakakew and his Ethiopic horde of
+scavengers had descended in a cloud, and they were tearing and
+fighting and beating their wings about Ahtik as if all of them had
+gone mad. Another cloud was hovering in air; every bush and near-
+by sapling was bending under the weight of them, and in the sun
+their jet-black plumage glistened as if they had just come out of
+the bath of a tinker's pot. Neewa stood astounded. He was not
+frightened; he had driven the cowardly robbers away many times.
+But never had there been so many of them. He could see no trace of
+his meat. Even the ground about it was black.
+
+He rushed out from the rocks with his lips drawn back, just as he
+had rushed a dozen or more times before. There was a mighty roar
+of wings. The air was darkened by them, and the ravenish screaming
+that followed could have been heard a mile away. This time Kakakew
+and his mighty crew did not fly back to the forest. Their number
+gave them courage. The taste of Ahtik's flesh and the flavour of
+it in their nostrils intoxicated them, to the point of madness,
+with desire. Neewa was dazed. Over him, behind him, on all sides
+of him they swept and circled, croaking and screaming at him, the
+boldest of them swooping down to beat at him with their wings.
+Thicker grew the menacing cloud, and then suddenly it descended
+like an avalanche. It covered Ahtik again. In it Neewa was fairly
+smothered. He felt himself buried under a mass of wings and
+bodies, and he began fighting, as he had fought the owls. A score
+of pincer-like black beaks fought to get at his hair and hide;
+others stabbed at his eyes; he felt his ears being pulled from his
+head, and the end of his nose was a bloody cushion within a dozen
+seconds. The breath was beaten out of him; he was blinded, and
+dazed, and every square inch of him was aquiver with its own
+excruciating pain. He forgot Ahtik. The one thing in the world he
+wanted most was a large open space in which to run.
+
+Putting all his strength into the effort he struggled to his feet
+and charged through the mass of living things about him. At this
+sign of defeat many of the crows left him to join in the feast. By
+the time he was half way to the cover into which Maheegun had gone
+all but one had left him. That one may have been Kakakew himself.
+He had fastened himself like a rat-trap to Neewa's stubby tail,
+and there he hung on like grim death while Neewa ran. He kept his
+hold until his victim was well into the cover. Then he flopped
+himself into the air and rejoined his brethren at the putrified
+carcass of the bull.
+
+If ever Neewa had wanted Miki he wanted him now. Again his entire
+viewpoint of the world was changed. He was stabbed in a hundred
+places. He burned as if afire. Even the bottoms of his feet hurt
+him when he stepped on them, and for half an hour he hid himself
+under a bush, licking his wounds and sniffing the air for Miki.
+
+Then he went down the slope into the creek bottom, and hurried to
+the foot of the trail he had made to and from the dip. Vainly he
+quested about him for his comrade. He grunted and squealed, and
+tried to catch the scent of him in the air. He ran up the creek a
+distance, and back again. Ahtik counted as nothing now.
+
+Miki was gone.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+
+A quarter of a mile away Miki had heard the clamour of the crows.
+But he was in no humour to turn back, even had he guessed that
+Neewa was in need of his help. He was hungry from long fasting
+and, for the present, his disposition had taken a decided turn. He
+was in a mood to tackle anything in the eating line, no matter how
+big, but he was a good mile from the dip in the side of the ridge
+before he found even a crawfish. He crunched this down, shell and
+all. It helped to take the bad taste out of his mouth.
+
+The day was destined to hold for him still another unforgettable
+event in his life. Now that he was alone the memory of his master
+was not so vague as it had been yesterday, and the days before.
+Brain-pictures came back to him more vividly as the morning
+lengthened into afternoon, bridging slowly but surely the gulf
+that Neewa's comradeship had wrought. For a time the exciting
+thrill of his adventure was gone. Half a dozen times he hesitated
+on the point of turning back to Neewa. It was hunger that always
+drove him on a little farther. He found two more crawfish. Then
+the creek deepened and its water ran slowly, and was darker. Twice
+he chased old rabbits, that got away from him easily. Once he came
+within an ace of catching a young one. Frequently a partridge rose
+with a thunder of wings. He saw moose-birds, and jays, and many
+squirrels. All about him was meat which it was impossible for him
+to catch. Then fortune turned his way. Poking his head into the
+end of a hollow log he cornered a rabbit so completely that there
+was no escape. During the next few minutes he indulged in the
+first square meal he had eaten for three days.
+
+So absorbed was he in his feast that he was unconscious of a new
+arrival on the scene. He did not hear the coming of Oochak, the
+fisher-cat; nor, for a few moments, did he smell him. It was not
+in Oochak's nature to make a disturbance. He was by birth and
+instinct a valiant hunter and a gentleman, and when he saw Miki
+(whom he took to be a young wolf) feeding on a fresh kill, he made
+no move to demand a share for himself. Nor did he run away. He
+would undoubtedly have continued on his way very soon if Miki had
+not finally sensed his presence, and faced him.
+
+Oochak had come from the other side of the log, and stood not more
+than six feet distant. To one who knew as little of his history as
+Miki there was nothing at all ferocious about him. He was shaped
+like his cousins, the weazel, the mink, and the skunk. He was
+about half as high as Miki, and fully as long, so that his two
+pairs of short legs seemed somewhat out of place, as on a
+dachshund. He probably weighed between eight and ten pounds, had a
+bullet head, almost no ears, and atrocious whiskers. Also he had a
+bushy tail and snapping little eyes that seemed to bore clean
+through whatever he looked at. To Miki his accidental presence was
+a threat and a challenge. Besides, Oochak looked like an easy
+victim if it came to a fight. So he pulled back his lips and
+snarled.
+
+Oochak accepted this as an invitation for him to move on, and
+being a gentleman who respected other people's preserves he made
+his apologies by beginning a velvet-footed exit. This was too much
+for Miki, who had yet to learn the etiquette of the forest trails.
+Oochak was afraid of him. He was running away! With a triumphant
+yelp Miki took after him. After all, it was simply a mistake in
+judgment. (Many two-footed animals with bigger brains than Miki's
+had made similar mistakes.) For Oochak, attending always to his
+own business, was, for his size and weight, the greatest little
+fighter in North America.
+
+Just what happened in the one minute that followed his assault
+Miki would never be able quite to understand. It was not in
+reality a fight; it was a one-sided immolation, a massacre. His
+first impression was that he had tackled a dozen Oochaks instead
+of one. Beyond that first impression his mind did not work, nor
+did his eyes visualize. He was whipped as he would never be
+whipped again in his life. He was cut and bruised and bitten; he
+was strangled and stabbed; he was so utterly mauled that for a
+space after Oochak had gone he continued to rake the air with his
+paws, unconscious of the fact that the affair was over. When he
+opened his eyes, and found himself alone, he slunk into the hollow
+log where he had cornered the rabbit.
+
+In there he lay a good half hour, trying hard to comprehend just
+what had happened. The sun was setting when he dragged himself
+out. He limped. His one good ear was bitten clean through. There
+were bare spots on his hide where Oochak had scraped the hair off.
+His bones ached, his throat was sore, and there was a lump over
+one eye. He looked longingly back over the "home" trail. Up there
+was Neewa. With the lengthening shadows of the day's end a great
+loneliness crept upon him and a desire to turn back to his
+comrade. But Oochak had gone that way--and he did not want to meet
+Oochak again.
+
+He wandered a little farther south and east, perhaps a quarter of
+a mile, before the sun disappeared entirely. In the thickening
+gloom of twilight he struck the Big Rock portage between the
+Beaver and the Loon.
+
+It was not a trail. Only at rare intervals did wandering voyageurs
+coming down from the north make use of it in their passage from
+one waterway to the other. Three or four times a year at the most
+would a wolf have caught the scent of man in it. It was there
+tonight, so fresh that Miki stopped when he came to it as if
+another Oochak had risen before him. For a space he was turned
+into the rigidity of rock by a single overwhelming emotion. All
+other things were forgotten in the fact that he had struck the
+trail of a man--AND, THEREFORE, THE TRAIL OF CHALLONER, HIS
+MASTER. He began to follow it--slowly at first, as if fearing that
+it might get away from him. Darkness came, and he was still
+following it. In the light of the stars he persisted, all else
+crowded from him but the homing instinct of the dog and the desire
+for a master.
+
+At last he came almost to the shore of the Loon, and there he saw
+the campfire of Makoki and the white man.
+
+He did not rush in. He did not bark or yelp; the hard schooling of
+the wilderness had already set its mark upon him. He slunk in
+cautiously--then stopped, flat on his belly, just outside the rim
+of firelight. Then he saw that neither of the men was Challoner.
+But both were smoking, as Challoner had smoked. He could hear
+their voices, and they were like Challoner's voice. And the camp
+was the same--a fire, a pot hanging over it, a tent, and in the
+air the odours of recently cooked things.
+
+Another moment or two and he would have gone into the firelight.
+But the white man rose to his feet, stretched himself as he had
+often seen Challoner stretch, and picked up a stick of wood as big
+as his arm. He came within ten feet of Miki, and Miki wormed
+himself just a little toward him, and stood up on his feet. It
+brought him into a half light. His eyes were aglow with the
+reflection of the fire. And the man saw him.
+
+In a flash the club he held was over his head; it swung through
+the air with the power of a giant arm behind it and was launched
+straight at Miki. Had it struck squarely it would have killed him.
+The big end of it missed him; the smaller end landed against his
+neck and shoulder, driving him back into the gloom with such force
+and suddenness that the man thought he had done for him. He called
+out loudly to Makoki that he had killed a young wolf or a fox, and
+dashed out into the darkness.
+
+The club had knocked Miki fairly into the heart of a thick ground
+spruce. There he lay, making no sound, with a terrible pain in his
+shoulder. Between himself and the fire he saw the man bend over
+and pick up the club. He saw Makoki hurrying toward him with
+ANOTHER club, and under his shelter he made himself as small as he
+could. He was filled with a great dread, for now he understood the
+truth. THESE men were not Challoner. They were hunting for him--
+with clubs in their hands. He knew what the clubs meant. His
+shoulder was almost broken.
+
+He lay very still while the men searched about him. The Indian
+even poked his stick into the thick ground spruce. The white man
+kept saying that he was sure he had made a hit, and once he stood
+so near that Miki's nose almost touched his boot. He went back and
+added fresh birch to the fire, so that the light of it illumined a
+greater space about them. Miki's heart stood still. But the men
+searched farther on, and at last went back to the fire.
+
+For an hour Miki did not move. The fire burned itself low. The old
+Cree wrapped himself in a blanket, and the white man went into his
+tent. Not until then did Miki dare to crawl out from under the
+spruce. With his bruised shoulder making him limp at every step he
+hurried back over the trail which he had followed so hopefully a
+little while before. The man-scent no longer made his heart beat
+swiftly with joy. It was a menace now. A warning. A thing from
+which he wanted to get away. He would sooner have faced Oochak
+again, or the owls, than the white man with his club. With the
+owls he could fight, but in the club he sensed an overwhelming
+superiority.
+
+The night was very still when he dragged himself back to the
+hollow log in which he had killed the rabbit. He crawled into it,
+and nursed his wounds through all the rest of the hours of
+darkness. In the early morning he came out and ate the rest of the
+rabbit.
+
+After that he faced the north and west--where Neewa was. There was
+no hesitation now. He wanted Neewa again. He wanted to muzzle him
+with his nose and lick his face even though he did smell to
+heaven. He wanted to hear him grunt and squeal in his funny,
+companionable way; he wanted to hunt with him again, and play with
+him, and lie down beside him in a sunny spot and sleep. Neewa, at
+last, was a necessary part of his world.
+
+He set out.
+
+And Neewa, far up the creek, still followed hopefully and
+yearningly over the trail of Miki.
+
+Half way to the dip, in a small open meadow that was a glory of
+sun, they met. There was no very great demonstration. They stopped
+and looked at each other for a moment, as if to make sure that
+there was no mistake. Neewa grunted. Miki wagged his tail. They
+smelled noses. Neewa responded with a little squeal, and Miki
+whined. It was as if they had said,
+
+"Hello, Miki!"
+
+"Hello, Neewa!"
+
+And then Neewa lay down in the sun and Miki sprawled himself out
+beside him. After all, it was a funny world. It went to pieces now
+and then, but it always came together again. And to-day their
+world had thoroughly adjusted itself. Once more they were chums--
+and they were happy.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN
+
+
+It was the Flying-Up Moon--deep and slumbering midsummer--in all
+the land of Keewatin. From Hudson Bay to the Athabasca and from
+the Hight of Land to the edge of the Great Barrens, forest, plain,
+and swamp lay in peace and forgetfulness under the sun-glowing
+days and the star-filled nights of the August MUKOO-SAWIN. It was
+the breeding moon, the growing moon, the moon when all wild life
+came into its own once more. For the trails of this wilderness
+world--so vast that it reached a thousand miles east and west and
+as far north and south--were empty of human life. At the Hudson
+Bay Company's posts--scattered here and there over the illimitable
+domain of fang and claw--had gathered the thousands of hunters and
+trappers, with their wives and children, to sleep and gossip and
+play through the few weeks of warmth and plenty until the strife
+and tragedy of another winter began. For these people of the
+forests it was MUKOO-SAWIN--the great Play Day of the year; the
+weeks in which they ran up new debts and established new credits
+at the Posts; the weeks in which they foregathered at every Post
+as at a great fair--playing, and making love, and marrying, and
+fattening up for the many days of hunger and gloom to come.
+
+It was because of this that the wild things had come fully into
+the possession of their world for a space. There was no longer the
+scent of man in all the wilderness. They were not hunted. There
+were no traps laid for their feet, no poison-baits placed
+temptingly where they might pass. In the fens and on the lakes the
+wildfowl squawked and honked unfearing to their young, just
+learning the power of wing; the lynx played with her kittens
+without sniffing the air for the menace of man; the cow moose went
+openly into the cool water of the lakes with their calves; the
+wolverine and the marten ran playfully over the roofs of deserted
+shacks and cabins; the beaver and the otter tumbled and frolicked
+in their dark pools; the birds sang, and through all the
+wilderness there was the drone and song of Nature as some Great
+Power must at first have meant that Nature should be. A new
+generation of wild things had been born. It was a season of Youth,
+with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of little
+children of the wild playing their first play, learning their
+first lessons, growing up swiftly to face the menace and doom of
+their first winter. And the Beneficent Spirit of the forests,
+anticipating what was to come, had prepared well for them.
+Everywhere there was plenty. The blueberries, the blackberries,
+the mountain-ash and the saskatoons were ripe; tree and vine were
+bent low with their burden of fruit. The grass was green and
+tender from the summer rains. Bulbous roots were fairly popping
+out of the earth; the fens and the edges of the lakes were rich
+with things to eat, overhead and underfoot the horn of plenty was
+emptying itself without stint.
+
+In this world Neewa and Miki found a vast and unending
+contentment. They lay, on this August afternoon, on a sun-bathed
+shelf of rock that overlooked a wonderful valley. Neewa, stuffed
+with luscious blueberries, was asleep. Miki's eyes were only
+partly closed as he looked down into the soft haze of the valley.
+Up to him came the rippling music of the stream running between
+the rocks and over the pebbly bars below, and with it the soft and
+languorous drone of the valley itself. He napped uneasily for half
+an hour, and then his eyes opened and he was wide awake. He took a
+sharp look over the valley. Then he looked at Neewa, who, fat and
+lazy, would have slept until dark. It was always Miki who kept him
+on the move. And now Miki barked at him gruffly two or three
+times, and nipped at one of his ears.
+
+"Wake up!" he might have said. "What's the sense of sleeping on a
+day like this? Let's go down along the creek and hunt something."
+
+Neewa roused himself, stretched his fat body, and yawned. Sleepily
+his little eyes took in the valley. Miki got up and gave the low
+and anxious whine which always told his companion that he wanted
+to be on the move. Neewa responded, and they began making their
+way down the green slope into the rich bottom between the two
+ridges.
+
+They were now almost six months of age, and in the matter of size
+had nearly ceased to be a cub and a pup. They were almost a dog
+and a bear. Miki's angular legs were getting their shape; his
+chest had filled out; his neck had grown until it no longer seemed
+too small for his big head and jaws, and his body had increased in
+girth and length until he was twice as big as most ordinary dogs
+of his age.
+
+Neewa had lost his round, ball-like cubbishness, though he still
+betrayed far more than Miki the fact that he was not many months
+lost from his mother. But he was no longer filled with that
+wholesome love of peace that had filled his earlier cubhood. The
+blood of Soominitik was at last beginning to assert itself, and he
+no longer sought a place of safety in time of battle--unless the
+grimness of utter necessity made it unavoidable. In fact, unlike
+most bears, he loved a fight. If there were a stronger term at
+hand it might be applied to Miki, the true son of Hela. Youthful
+as they were, they were already covered with scars that would have
+made a veteran proud. Crows and owls, wolf-fang and fisher-claw
+had all left their marks, and on Miki's side was a bare space
+eight inches long left as a souvenir by a wolverine.
+
+In Neewa's funny round head there had grown, during the course of
+events, an ambition to have it out some day with a citizen of his
+own kind; but the two opportunities that had come his way were
+spoiled by the fact that the other cubs' mothers were with them.
+So now, when Miki led off on his trips of adventure, Neewa always
+followed with another thrill than that of getting something to
+eat, which so long had been his one ambition. Which is not to say
+that Neewa had lost his appetite. He could eat more in one day
+than Miki could eat in three, mainly because Miki was satisfied
+with two or three meals a day while Neewa preferred one--a
+continuous one lasting from dawn until dark. On the trail he was
+always eating something.
+
+A quarter of a mile along the foot of the ridge, in a stony coulee
+down which a tiny rivulet trickled, there grew the finest wild
+currants in all the Shamattawa country. Big as cherries, black as
+ink, and swelling almost to the bursting point with luscious
+juice, they hung in clusters so thick that Neewa could gather them
+by the mouthful. Nothing in all the wilderness is quite so good as
+one of these dead-ripe black currants, and this coulee wherein
+they grew so richly Neewa had preempted as his own personal
+property. Miki, too, had learned to eat the currants; so to the
+coulee they went this afternoon, for such currants as these one
+can eat even when one is already full. Besides, the coulee was
+fruitful for Miki in other ways. There were many young partridges
+and rabbits in it--"fool hens" of tender flesh and delicious
+flavour which he caught quite easily, and any number of gophers
+and squirrels.
+
+To-day they had scarcely taken their first mouthful of the big
+juicy currants when an unmistakable sound came to them.
+Unmistakable because each recognized instantly what it meant. It
+was the tearing down of currant bushes twenty or thirty yards
+higher up the coulee. Some robber had invaded their treasure-
+house, and instantly Miki bared his fangs while Neewa wrinkled up
+his nose in an ominous snarl. Soft-footed they advanced toward the
+sound until they came to the edge of a small open space which was
+as flat as a table. In the centre of this space was a clump of
+currant bushes not more than a yard in girth, and black with
+fruit; and squatted on his haunches there, gathering the laden
+bushes in his arms, was a young black bear about four sizes larger
+than Neewa.
+
+In that moment of consternation and rage Neewa did not take size
+into consideration. He was much in the frame of mind of a man
+returning home to discover his domicile, and all it contained, in
+full possession of another. At the same time here was his ambition
+easily to be achieved--his ambition to lick the daylight out of a
+member of his own kind. Miki seemed to sense this fact. Under
+ordinary conditions he would have led in the fray, and before
+Neewa had fairly got started, would have been at the impudent
+interloper's throat. But now something held him back, and it was
+Neewa who first shot out--like a black bolt--landing squarely in
+the ribs of his unsuspecting enemy.
+
+(Old Makoki, the Cree runner, had he seen that attack, would
+instantly have found a name for the other bear--"Petoot-a-wapis-
+kum," which means, literally: "Kicked-off-his-Feet." Perhaps he
+would have called him "Pete" for short. For the Cree believes in
+fitting names to fact, and Petoot-a-wapis-kum certainly fitted the
+unknown bear like a glove.)
+
+Taken utterly by surprise, with his mouth full of berries, he was
+bowled over like an overfilled bag under the force of Neewa's
+charge. So complete was his discomfiture for the moment that Miki,
+watching the affair with a yearning interest, could not keep back
+an excited yap of approbation. Before Pete could understand what
+had happened, and while the berries were still oozing from his
+mouth, Neewa was at his throat--and the fun began.
+
+Now bears, and especially young bears, have a way of fighting that
+is all their own. It reminds one of a hair-pulling contest between
+two well-matched ladies. There are no rules to the game--
+absolutely none. As Pete and Neewa clinched, their hind legs began
+to do the fighting, and the fur began to fly. Pete, being already
+on his back--a first-class battling position for a bear--would
+have possessed an advantage had it not been for Neewa's ferocious
+hold at his throat. As it was, Neewa sank his fangs in to their
+full length, and scrubbed away for dear life with his sharp hind
+claws. Miki drew nearer at sight of the flying fur, his soul
+filled with joy. Then Pete got one leg into action, and then the
+other, and Miki's jaws came together with a sudden click. Over and
+over the two fighters rolled, Neewa holding to his throat-grip,
+and not a squeal or a grunt came from either of them. Pebbles and
+dirt flew along with hair and fur. Stones rolled with a clatter
+down the coulee. The very air trembled with the thrill of combat.
+In Miki's attitude of tense waiting there was something now of
+suspicious anxiety. With eight furry legs scratching and tearing
+furiously, and the two fighters rolling and twisting and
+contorting themselves like a pair of windmills gone mad, it was
+almost impossible for Miki to tell who was getting the worst of
+it--Neewa or Pete; at least he was in doubt for a matter of three
+or four minutes.
+
+Then he recognized Neewa's voice. It was very faint, but for all
+that it was an unmistakable bawl of pain.
+
+Smothered under Pete's heavier body Neewa began to realize, at the
+end of those three or four minutes, that he had tackled more than
+was good for him. It was altogether Pete's size and not his
+fighting qualities, for Neewa had him outpointed there. But he
+fought on, hoping for some good turn of luck, until at last Pete
+got him just where he wanted him and began raking him up and down
+his sides until in another three minutes he would have been half
+skinned if Miki hadn't judged the moment ripe for intervention.
+Even then Neewa was taking his punishment without a howl.
+
+In another instant Miki had Pete by the ear. It was a grim and
+terrible hold. Old Soominitik himself would have bawled lustily in
+the circumstances. Pete raised his voice in a howl of agony. He
+forgot everything else but the terror and the pain of this new
+SOMETHING that had him by the ear, and he rent the air with his
+outcry. His lamentation poured in an unbroken spasm of sound from
+his throat. Neewa knew that Miki was in action.
+
+He pulled himself from under the young interloper's body--and not
+a second too soon. Down the coulee, charging like a mad bull, came
+Pete's mother. Neewa was off like a shot just as she made a
+powerful swing at him. The blow missed, and the old bear turned
+excitedly to her bawling offspring. Miki, hanging joyously to his
+victim, was oblivious of his danger until Pete's mother was almost
+upon him. He caught sight of her just as her long arm shot out
+like a wooden beam. He dodged; and the blow intended for him
+landed full against the side of the unfortunate Pete's head with a
+force that took him clean off his feet and sent him flying like a
+football twenty yards down the coulee.
+
+Miki did not wait for further results. Quick as a flash he was in
+a currant thicket tearing down the little gulch after Neewa. They
+came out on the plain together, and for a good ten minutes they
+did not halt in their flight long enough to look back. When they
+did, the coulee was a mile away. They sat down, panting. Neewa's
+red tongue was hanging out in his exhaustion. He was scratched and
+bleeding; loose hair hung all over him. As he looked at Miki there
+was something in the dolorous expression of Neewa's face which was
+a confession of the fact that he realized Pete had licked him.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE
+
+
+After the fight in the coulee there was no longer a thought on the
+part of Neewa and Miki of returning to the Garden of Eden in which
+the black currants grew so lusciously. From the tip of his tail to
+the end of his nose Miki was an adventurer, and like the nomadic
+rovers of old he was happiest when on the move. The wilderness had
+claimed him now, body and soul, and it is probable that he would
+have shunned a human camp at this stage of his life, even as Neewa
+would have shunned it. But in the lives of beasts, as well as in
+the lives of men, Fate plays her pranks and tricks, and even as
+they turned into the vast and mystery-filled spaces of the great
+lake and waterway-country, to the west, events were slowly shaping
+themselves into what was to be perhaps the darkest hour of gloom
+in the life of Miki, son of Hela.
+
+Through six glorious and sun-filled weeks of late summer and early
+autumn--until the middle of September--Miki and Neewa ranged the
+country westward, always heading toward the setting sun, the
+country of Jackson's Knee, of the Touchwood and the Clearwater,
+and God's Lake. In this country they saw many things. It was a
+region a hundred miles square which the handiwork of Nature had
+made into a veritable kingdom of the wild. They came upon great
+beaver colonies in the dark and silent places; they watched the
+otter at play; they came upon moose and caribou so frequently that
+they no longer feared or evaded them, but walked out openly into
+the meadows or down to the edge of the swamps where they were
+feeding. It was here that Miki learned the great lesson that claw
+and fang were made to prey upon cloven hoof and horn, for the
+wolves were thick, and a dozen times they came upon their kills,
+and even more frequently heard the wild tongue of the hunting-
+packs. Since his experience with Maheegun he no longer had the
+desire to join them. And now Neewa no longer insisted on remaining
+near meat when they found it. It was the beginning of the KWASKA-
+HAO in Neewa--the instinctive sensing of the Big Change.
+
+Until early in October Miki could see but little of this change in
+his comrade. It was then that Neewa became more and more restless,
+and this restlessness grew as the chill nights came, and autumn
+breathed more heavily in the air. It was Neewa who took the lead
+in their peregrinations now, and he seemed always to be questing
+for something--a mysterious something which Miki could neither
+smell nor see. He no longer slept for hours at a time. By mid-
+October he slept scarcely at all, but roved through most of the
+hours of night as well as day, eating, eating, eating, and always
+smelling the wind for that elusive thing which Nature was
+commanding him to seek and find. Ceaselessly he was nosing under
+windfalls and among the rocks, and Miki was always near him,
+always on the QUI VIVE for battle with the thing that Neewa was
+hunting out. And it seemed to be never found.
+
+Then Neewa turned back to the east, drawn by the instinct of his
+forefathers; back toward the country of Noozak, his mother, and of
+Soominitik, his father; and Miki followed. The nights grew more
+and more chill. The stars seemed farther away, and no longer was
+the forest moon red like blood. The cry of the loon had a moaning
+note in it, a note of grief and lamentation. And in their shacks
+and tepees the forest people sniffed the air of frosty mornings,
+and soaked their traps in fish-oil and beaver-grease, and made
+their moccasins, and mended snow-shoe and sledge, for the cry of
+the loon said that winter was creeping down out of the North. And
+the swamps grew silent. The cow moose no longer mooed to her
+young. In place of it, from the open plain and "burn" rose the
+defiant challenge of bull to bull and the deadly clash of horn
+against horn under the stars of night. The wolf no longer howled
+to hear his voice. In the travel of padded feet there came to be a
+slinking, hunting caution. In all the forest world blood was
+running red again.
+
+And then--November.
+
+Perhaps Miki would never forget that first day when the snow came.
+At first he thought all the winged things in the world were
+shedding their white feathers. Then he felt the fine, soft touch
+of it under his feet, and the chill. It sent the blood rushing
+like a new kind of fire through his body; a wild and thrilling
+joy--the exultation that leaps through the veins of the wolf when
+the winter comes.
+
+With Neewa its effect was different--so different that even Miki
+felt the oppression of it, and waited vaguely and anxiously for
+what was to come. And then, on this day of the first snow, he saw
+his comrade do a strange and unaccountable thing. He began to eat
+things that he had never touched as food before. He lapped up soft
+pine needles, and swallowed them. He ate of the dry, pulpy
+substance of rotted logs. And then he went into a great cleft
+broken into the heart of a rocky ridge, and found at last the
+thing for which he had been seeking. It was a cavern--deep, and
+dark, and warm.
+
+Nature works in strange ways. She gives to the birds of the air
+eyes which men may never have, and she gives to the beasts of the
+earth an instinct which men may never know. For Neewa had come
+back to sleep his first Long Sleep in the place of his birth--the
+cavern in which Noozak, his mother, had brought him into the
+world.
+
+His old bed was still there, the wallow in the soft sand, the
+blanket of hair Noozak had shed; but the smell of his mother was
+gone. In the nest where he was born Neewa lay down, and for the
+last time he grunted softly to Miki. It was as if he felt upon him
+the touch of a hand, gentle but inevitable, which he could no
+longer refuse to obey, and to Miki was saying, for the last time:
+"Good-night!"
+
+That night the PIPOO KESTIN--the first storm of
+winter--came like an avalanche from out of the North. With it came
+a wind that was like the roaring of a thousand bulls, and over all
+the land of the wild there was nothing that moved. Even in the
+depth of the cavern Miki heard the beat and the wail of it and the
+swishing of the shot-like snow beyond the door through which they
+had come, and he snuggled close to Neewa, content that they had
+found shelter.
+
+With the day he went to the slit in the face of the rock, and in
+his astonishment he made no sound, but stared forth upon a world
+that was no longer the world he had left last night. Everywhere it
+was white--a dazzling, eye-blinding white. The sun had risen. It
+shot a thousand flashing shafts of radiant light into Miki's eyes.
+So far as his vision could reach the earth was as if covered with
+a robe of diamonds. From rock and tree and shrub blazed the fire
+of the sun; it quivered in the tree-tops, bent low with their
+burden of snow; it was like a sea in the valley, so vivid that the
+unfrozen stream running through the heart of it was black. Never
+had Miki seen a day so magnificent. Never had his heart pounded at
+the sight of the sun as it pounded now, and never had his blood
+burned with a wilder exultation. He whined, and ran back to Neewa.
+He barked in the gloom of the cavern and gave his comrade a nudge
+with his nose. Neewa grunted sleepily. He stretched himself,
+raised his head for an instant, and then curled himself into a
+ball again. Vainly Miki protested that it was day, and time for
+them to be moving. Neewa made no response, and after a while Miki
+returned to the mouth of the cavern, and looked back to see if
+Neewa was following him. Then, disappointed, he went out into the
+snow. For an hour he did not move farther than ten feet away from
+the den. Three times he returned to Neewa and urged him to get up
+and come out where it was light. In that far corner of the cavern
+it was dark, and it was as if he were trying to tell Neewa that he
+was a dunce to lie there still thinking it was night when the sun
+was up outside. But he failed. Neewa was in the edge of his Long
+Sleep--the beginning of USKE-POW-A-MEW, the dream land of the
+bears.
+
+Annoyance, the desire almost to sink his teeth in Neewa's ear,
+gave place slowly to another thing in Miki. The instinct that
+between beasts is like the spoken reason of men stirred in a
+strange and disquieting way within him. He became more and more
+uneasy. There was almost distress in his restlessness as he
+hovered about the mouth of the cavern. A last time he went to
+Neewa, and then he started alone down into the valley.
+
+He was hungry, but on this first day after the storm there was
+small chance of him finding anything to eat. The snowshoe rabbits
+were completely buried under their windfalls and shelters, and lay
+quietly in their warm nests. Nothing had moved during the hours of
+the storm. There were no trails of living things for him to
+follow, and in places he sank to his shoulders in the soft snow.
+He made his way to the creek. It was no longer the creek he had
+known. It was edged with ice. There was something dark and
+brooding about it now. The sound it made was no longer the
+rippling song of summer and golden autumn. There was a threat in
+its gurgling monotone--a new voice, as if a black and forbidding
+spirit had taken possession of it and was warning him that the
+times had changed, and that new laws and a new force had come to
+claim sovereignty in the land of his birth.
+
+He drank of the water cautiously. It was cold--ice-cold. Slowly it
+was being impinged upon him that in the beauty of this new world
+that was his there was no longer the warm and pulsing beat of the
+heart that was life. He was alone. ALONE! Everything else was
+covered up; everything else seemed dead.
+
+He went back to Neewa and lay close to him all through the day.
+And through the night that followed he did not move again from the
+cavern. He went only as far as the door and saw celestial spaces
+ablaze with stars and a moon that rode up into the heavens like a
+white sun. They, too, seemed no longer like the moon and stars he
+had known. They were terribly still and cold. And under them the
+earth was terribly white and silent.
+
+With the coming of dawn he tried once more to awaken Neewa. But
+this time he was not so insistent. Nor did he have the desire to
+nip Neewa with his teeth. Something had happened--something which
+he could not understand. He sensed the thing, but he could not
+reason it. And he was filled with a strange and foreboding fear.
+
+He went down again to hunt. Under the glory of the moon and stars
+it had been a wild night of carnival for the rabbits, and in the
+edge of the timber Miki found the snow beaten hard in places with
+their tracks. It was not difficult for him to stalk his breakfast
+this morning. He made his kill, and feasted. He killed again after
+that, and still again. He could have gone on killing, for now that
+the snow betrayed them, the hiding-places of the rabbits were so
+many traps for them. Miki's courage returned. He was fired again
+with the joy of life. Never had he known such hunting, never had
+he found such a treasure-house before--not even in the coulee
+where the currants grew. He ate until he could eat no more, and
+then he went back to Neewa, carrying with him one of the rabbits
+he had slain. He dropped it in front of his comrade, and whined.
+Even then Neewa did not respond, except to draw a deeper breath,
+and change his position a little.
+
+That afternoon, for the first time in many hours, Neewa rose to
+his feet, stretched himself, and sniffed of the dead rabbit. But
+he did not eat. To Miki's consternation he rolled himself round
+and round in his nest of sand and went to sleep again.
+
+The next day, at about the same time, Neewa roused himself once
+more. This time he went as far as the mouth of the den, and lapped
+up a few mouthfuls of snow. But he still refused to eat the
+rabbit. Again it was Nature telling him that he must not disturb
+the pine needles and dry bark with which he had padded his stomach
+and intestines. And he went to sleep again. He did not get up
+after that.
+
+Day followed day, and, growing lonelier as the winter deepened,
+Miki hunted alone. All through November he came back each night
+and slept with Neewa. And Neewa was as if dead, except that his
+body was warm, and he breathed, and made little sounds now and
+then in his throat. But this did not satisfy the great yearning
+that was becoming more and more insistent in Miki's soul, the
+overwhelming desire for company, for a brotherhood on the trail.
+He loved Neewa. Through the first long weeks of winter he returned
+to him faithfully; he brought him meat. He was filled with a
+strange grief--even greater than if Neewa had been dead. For Miki
+knew that he was alive, and he could not account for the thing
+that had happened. Death he would have understood, and FROM death
+he would have gone away--for good.
+
+So it came that one night, having hunted far, Miki remained away
+from the den for the first time, and slept under a deep windfall.
+After that it was still harder for him to resist the CALL. A
+second and a third night he went away; and then came the time--
+inevitable as the coming and going of the moon and stars--when
+understanding at last broke its way through his hope and his fear,
+and something told him that Neewa would never again travel with
+him as through those glorious days of old, when shoulder to
+shoulder they had faced together the comedies and tragedies of
+life in a world that was no longer soft and green and warm with a
+golden sun, but white, and still, and filled with death.
+
+Neewa did not know when Miki went away from the den for the last
+time. And yet it may be that even in his slumber the Beneficent
+Spirit may have whispered that Miki was going, for there were
+restlessness and disquiet in Neewa's dreamland for many days
+thereafter.
+
+"Be quiet--and sleep!" the Spirit may have whispered. "The Winter
+is long. The rivers are black and chill, the lakes are covered
+with floors of ice, and the waterfalls are frozen like great white
+giants. Sleep! For Miki must go his way, just as the waters of the
+streams must go their way to the sea. For he is Dog. And you are
+Bear. SLEEP!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THIRTEEN
+
+
+In many years there had not been such a storm in all the Northland
+as that which followed swiftly in the trail of the first snows
+that had driven Neewa into his den--the late November storm of
+that year which will long be remembered as KUSKETA PIPPOON (the
+Black Year), the year of great and sudden cold, of starvation and
+of death.
+
+It came a week after Miki had left the cavern wherein Neewa was
+sleeping so soundly. Preceding that, when all the forest world lay
+under its mantle of white, the sun shone day after day, and the
+moon and stars were as clear as golden fires in the night skies.
+The wind was out of the west. The rabbits were so numerous they
+made hard floors of the snow in thicket and swamp. Caribou and
+moose were plentiful, and the early cry of wolves on the hunt was
+like music in the ears of a thousand trappers in shack and teepee.
+
+With appalling suddenness came the unexpected. There was no
+warning. The day had dawned with a clear sky, and a bright sun
+followed the dawn. Then the world darkened so swiftly that men on
+their traplines paused in amazement. With the deepening gloom came
+a strange moaning, and there was something in that sound that
+seemed like the rolling of a great drum--the knell of an impending
+doom. It was THUNDER. The warning was too late. Before men could
+turn back to safety, or build themselves shelters, the Big Storm
+was upon them. For three days and three nights it raged like a mad
+bull from out of the north. In the open barrens no living creature
+could stand upon its feet. The forests were broken, and all the
+earth was smothered. All things that breathed buried themselves--
+or died; for the snow that piled itself up in windrows and
+mountains was round and hard as leaden shot, and with it came an
+intense cold.
+
+On the third day it was sixty degrees below zero in the country
+between the Shamattawa and Jackson's Knee. Not until the fourth
+day did living things begin to move. Moose and caribou heaved
+themselves up out of the thick covering of snow that had been
+their protection; smaller animals dug their way out of the heart
+of deep drifts and mounds; a half of the rabbits and birds were
+dead. But the most terrible toll was of men. Many of those who
+were caught out succeeded in keeping the life within their bodies,
+and dragged themselves back to teepee and shack. But there were
+also many who did not return--five hundred who died between Hudson
+Bay and the Athabasca in those three terrible days of the KUSKETA
+PIPPOON.
+
+In the beginning of the Big Storm Miki found himself in the
+"burnt" country of Jackson's Knee, and instinct sent him quickly
+into deeper timber. Here he crawled into a windfall of tangled
+trunks and tree-tops, and during the three days he did not move.
+Buried in the heart of the storm, there came upon him an
+overwhelming desire to return to Neewa's den, and to snuggle up to
+him once more, even though Neewa lay as if dead. The strange
+comradeship that had grown up between the two--their wanderings
+together all through the summer, the joys and hardships of the
+days and months in which they had fought and feasted like
+brothers--were memories as vivid in his brain as if it had all
+happened yesterday. And in the dark wind-fall, buried deeper and
+deeper under the snow, he dreamed.
+
+He dreamed of Challoner, who had been his master in the days of
+his joyous puppyhood; he dreamed of the time when Neewa, the
+motherless cub, was brought into camp, and of the happenings that
+had come to them afterward; the loss of his master, of their
+strange and thrilling adventures in the wilderness, and last of
+all of Neewa's denning-up. He could not understand that. Awake,
+and listening to the storm, he wondered why it was that Neewa no
+longer hunted with him, but had curled himself up into a round
+ball, and slept a sleep from which he could not rouse him. Through
+the long hours of the three days and nights of storm it was
+loneliness more than hunger that ate at his vitals. When on the
+morning of the fourth day he came out from under the windfall his
+ribs were showing and there was a reddish film over his eyes.
+First of all he looked south and east, and whined.
+
+Through twenty miles of snow he travelled back that day to the
+ridge where he had left Neewa. On this fourth day the sun shone
+like a dazzling fire. It was so bright that the glare of the snow
+pricked his eyes, and the reddish film grew redder. There was only
+a cold glow in the west when he came to the end of his journey.
+Dusk had already begun to settle over the roofs of the forests
+when he reached the ridge where Neewa had found the cavern. It was
+no longer a ridge. The wind had piled the snow up over it in
+grotesque and monstrous shapes. Rocks and bushes were obliterated.
+Where the mouth of the cavern should have been was a drift ten
+feet deep. Cold and hungry, thinned by his days and nights of
+fasting, and with his last hope of comradeship shattered by the
+pitiless mountains of snow, Miki turned back over his trail. There
+was nothing left for him now but the old windfall, and his heart
+was no longer the heart of the joyous comrade and brother of
+Neewa, the bear. His feet were sore and bleeding, but still he
+went on. The stars came out; the night was ghostly white in their
+pale fire; and it was cold--terribly cold. The trees began to
+snap. Now and then there came a report like a pistol-shot as the
+frost snapped at the heart of timber. It was thirty degrees below
+zero. And it was growing colder. With the windfall as his only
+inspiration Miki drove himself on. Never had he tested his
+strength or his endurance as he strained them now. Older dogs
+would have fallen in the trail or have sought shelter or rest. But
+Miki was the true son of Hela, his giant Mackenzie hound father,
+and he would have continued until he triumphed--or died.
+
+But a strange thing happened. He had travelled twenty miles to the
+ridge, and fifteen of the twenty miles back, when a shelf of snow
+gave way under his feet and he was pitched suddenly downward. When
+he gathered his dazed wits and stood up on his half frozen legs he
+found himself in a curious place. He had rolled completely into a
+wigwam-shaped shelter of spruce boughs and sticks, and strong in
+his nostrils was the SMELL OF MEAT. He found the meat not more
+than a foot from the end of his nose. It was a chunk of frozen
+caribou flesh transfixed on a stick, and without questioning the
+manner of its presence he gnawed at it ravenously. Only Jacques Le
+Beau, who lived eight or ten miles to the east, could have
+explained the situation. Miki had rolled into one of his trap-
+houses, and it was the bait he was eating.
+
+There was not much of it, but it fired Miki's blood with new life.
+There was smell in his nostrils now, and he began clawing in the
+snow. After a little his teeth struck something hard and cold. It
+was steel--a fisher trap. He dragged it up from under a foot of
+snow, and with it came a huge rabbit. The snow had so protected
+the rabbit that, although several days dead, it was not frozen
+stiff. Not until the last bone of it was gone did Miki's feast
+end. He even devoured the head. Then he went on to the windfall,
+and in his warm nest slept until another day.
+
+That day Jacques Le Beau--whom the Indians called "Muchet-ta-aao"
+(the One with an Evil Heart)--went over his trapline and rebuilt
+his snow-smothered "houses" and re-set his traps.
+
+It was in the afternoon that Miki, who was hunting, struck his
+trail in a swamp several miles from the windfall. No longer was
+his soul stirred by the wild yearning for a master. He sniffed,
+suspiciously, of Le Beau's snowshoe tracks and the crest along his
+spine trembled as he caught the wind, and listened. He followed
+cautiously, and a hundred yards farther on came to one of Le
+Beau's KEKEKS or trap-shelters. Here too, there was meat--fixed on
+a peg. Miki reached in. From under his fore-paw came a vicious
+snap and the steel jaws of a trap flung sticks and snow into his
+face. He snarled, and for a few moments he waited, with his eyes
+on the trap. Then he stretched himself until he reached the meat,
+without advancing his feet. Thus he had discovered the hidden
+menace of the steel jaws, and instinct told him how to evade them.
+
+For another third of a mile he followed Le Beau's tracks. He
+sensed the presence of a new and thrilling danger, and yet he did
+not turn off the trail. An impulse which he was powerless to
+resist drew him on. He came to a second trap, and this time he
+robbed the bait-peg without springing the thing which he knew was
+concealed close under it. His long fangs clicked as he went on. He
+was eager for a glimpse of the man-beast. But he did not hurry. A
+third, a fourth, and a fifth trap he robbed of their meat.
+
+Then, as the day ended, he swung westward and covered quickly the
+five miles between the swamp and his windfall.
+
+Half an hour later Le Beau came back over the line. He saw the
+first empty KEKEK, and the tracks in the snow.
+
+"TONNERRE!--a wolf!" he exclaimed. "And in broad day!"
+
+Then a slow look of amazement crept into his face, and he fell
+upon his knees in the snow and examined the tracks.
+
+"NON!" he gasped. "It is a dog! A devil of a wild dog--robbing my
+traps!"
+
+He rose to his feet, cursing. From the pocket of his coat he drew
+a small tin box, and from this box he took a round ball of fat. In
+the heart of the fat was a strychnine capsule. It was a poison-
+bait, to be set for wolves and foxes.
+
+Le Beau chuckled exultantly as he stuck the deadly lure on the end
+of the bait-peg.
+
+"OW, a wild dog," he growled. "I will teach him. To-morrow he will
+be dead."
+
+On each of the five ravished bait-pegs he placed a strychnine
+capsule rolled in its inviting little ball of fat.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOURTEEN
+
+
+The next morning Miki set out again for the trapline of Jacques Le
+Beau. It was not the thought of food easily secured that tempted
+him. There would have been a greater thrill in killing for
+himself. It was the trail, with its smell of the man-beast, that
+drew him like a magnet. Where that smell was very strong he wanted
+to lie down, and wait. Yet with his desire there was also fear,
+and a steadily growing caution. He did not tamper with the first
+KEKEK, nor with the second. At the third Le Beau had fumbled in
+the placing of his bait, and for that reason the little ball of
+fat was strong with the scent of his hands. A fox would have
+turned away from it quickly. Miki, however, drew it from the peg
+and dropped it in the snow between his forefeet. Then he looked
+about him, and listened for a full minute. After that he licked
+the ball of fat with his tongue. The scent of Le Beau's hands kept
+him from swallowing it as he had swallowed the caribou meat. A
+little suspiciously he crushed it slowly between his jaws. The fat
+was sweet. He was about to gulp it down when he detected another
+and less pleasant taste, and what remained in his mouth he spat
+out upon the snow. But the acrid bite of the poison remained upon
+his tongue and in his throat. It crept deeper--and he caught up a
+mouthful of snow and swallowed it to put out the burning sensation
+that was crawling nearer to his vitals.
+
+Had he devoured the ball of fat as he had eaten the other baits he
+would have been dead within a quarter of an hour, and Le Beau
+would not have gone far to find his body. As it was, he was
+beginning to turn sick at the end of the fifteen minutes. A
+premonition of the evil that was upon him drew him off the trail
+and in the direction of the windfall. He had gone only a short
+distance when suddenly his legs gave way under him, and he fell.
+He began to shiver. Every muscle in his body trembled. His teeth
+clicked. His eyes grew wide, and it was impossible for him to
+move. And then, like a hand throttling him, there came a strange
+stiffness in the back of his neck, and his breath hissed chokingly
+out of his throat. The stiffness passed like a wave of fire
+through his body. Where his muscles had trembled and shivered a
+moment before they now became rigid and lifeless. The throttling
+grip of the poison at the base of his brain drew his head back
+until his muzzle was pointed straight up to the sky. Still he made
+no cry. For a space every nerve in his body was at the point of
+death.
+
+Then came the change. As though a string had snapped, the horrible
+grip left the back of his neck; the stiffness shot out of his body
+in a flood of shivering cold, and in another moment he was
+twisting and tearing up the snow in mad convulsions. The spasm
+lasted for perhaps a minute. When it was over Miki was panting.
+Streams of saliva dripped from his jaws into the snow. But he was
+alive. Death had missed him by a hair, and after a little he
+staggered to his feet and continued on his way to the windfall.
+
+Thereafter Jacques Le Beau might place a million poison capsules
+in his way and he would not touch them. Never again would he steal
+the meat from a bait-peg.
+
+Two days later Le Beau saw where Miki had fought his fight with
+death in the snow and his heart was black with rage and
+disappointment. He began to follow the footprints of the dog. It
+was noon when he came to the windfall and saw the beaten path
+where Miki entered it. On his knees he peered into the cavernous
+depths--and saw nothing. But Miki, lying watchfully, saw the man,
+and he was like the black, bearded monster who had almost killed
+him with a club a long time ago. And in his heart, too, there was
+disappointment, for away back in his memory of things there was
+always the thought of Challoner--the master he had lost; and it
+was never Challoner whom he found when he came upon the man smell.
+
+Le Beau heard his growl, and the man's blood leapt excitedly as he
+rose to his feet. He could not go in after the wild dog, and he
+could not lure him out. But there was another way. He would drive
+him out with fire!
+
+Deep back in his fortress, Miki heard the crunch of Le Beau's feet
+in the snow. A few minutes later he saw the man-beast again
+peering into his lair.
+
+"BETE, BETE," he called half tauntingly, and again Miki growled.
+
+Jacques was satisfied. The windfall was not more than thirty or
+forty feet in diameter, and about it the forest was open and clear
+of undergrowth. It would be impossible for the wild dog to get
+away from his rifle.
+
+A second time he went around the piled-up mass of fallen timber.
+On three sides it was completely smothered under the deep snow.
+Only where Miki's trail entered was it open.
+
+Getting the wind behind him Le Beau made his ISKOO of birch-bark
+and dry wood at the far end of the windfall. The seasoned logs and
+tree-tops caught the fire like tinder, and within a few minutes
+the flames began to crackle and roar in a manner that made Miki
+wonder what was happening. For a space the smoke did not reach
+him. Le Beau, watching, with his rifle in his bare hands, did not
+for an instant let his eyes leave the spot where the wild dog must
+come out.
+
+Suddenly a pungent whiff of smoke filled Miki's nostrils, and a
+thin white cloud crept in a ghostly veil between him and the
+opening. A crawling, snake-like rope of it began to pour between
+two logs within a yard of him, and with it the strange roaring
+grew nearer and more menacing. Then, for the first time, he saw
+lightning flashes of yellow flame through the tangled debris as
+the fire ate into the heart of a mass of pitch-filled spruce. In
+another ten seconds the flames leapt twenty feet into the air, and
+Jacques Le Beau stood with his rifle half to his shoulder, ready
+to kill.
+
+Appalled by the danger that was upon him, Miki did not forget Le
+Beau. With an instinct sharpened to fox-like keenness his mind
+leapt instantly to the truth of the matter. It was the man-beast
+who had set this new enemy upon him; and out there, just beyond
+the opening, the man-beast was waiting. So, like the fox, he did
+what Le Beau least expected. He crawled back swiftly through the
+tangled tops until he came to the wall of snow that shut the
+windfall in, and through this he burrowed his way almost as
+quickly as the fox himself would have done it. With his jaws he
+tore through the half-inch outer crust, and a moment later stood
+in the open, with the fire between him and Le Beau.
+
+The windfall was a blazing furnace, and suddenly Le Beau ran back
+a dozen steps so that he could see on the farther side. A hundred
+yards away he saw Miki making for the deeper forest.
+
+It was a clear shot. At that distance Le Beau would have staked
+his life that it was impossible for him to miss. He did not hurry.
+One shot, and it would be over. He raised his rifle, and in that
+instant a wisp of smoke came like the lash of a whip with the wind
+and caught him fairly in the eyes, and his bullet passed three
+inches over Miki's head. The whining snarl of it was a new thing
+to Miki. But he recognized the thunder of the gun--and he knew
+what a gun could do. To Le Beau, still firing at him through the
+merciful cloud of smoke, he was like a gray streak flashing to the
+thick timber. Three times more Le Beau fired. From the edge of a
+dense clump of spruce Miki flung back a defiant howl. He
+disappeared as Le Beau's last shot shovelled up the snow at his
+heels.
+
+The narrowness of his escape from the man-beast did not frighten
+Miki out of the Jackson's Knee country. If anything, it held him
+more closely to it. It gave him something to think about besides
+Neewa and his aloneness. As the fox returns to peer stealthily
+upon the deadfall that has almost caught him, so the trapline was
+possessed now of a new thrill for Miki. Heretofore the man-smell
+had held for him only a vague significance; now it marked the
+presence of a real and concrete danger. And he welcomed it. His
+wits were sharpened. The fascination of the trapline was deadlier
+than before.
+
+From the burned windfall he made a wide detour to a point where Le
+Beau's snowshoe trail entered the edge of the swamp; and here,
+hidden in a thick clump of bushes, he watched him as he travelled
+homeward half an hour later.
+
+From that day he hung like a grim, gray ghost to the trapline.
+Silent-footed, cautious, always on the alert for the danger which
+threatened him, he haunted Jacques Le Beau's thoughts and
+footsteps with the elusive persistence of a were-wolf--a loup-
+garou of the Black Forest. Twice in the next week Le Beau caught a
+flash of him. Three times he heard him howl. And twice he followed
+his trail until, in despair and exhaustion, he turned back. Never
+was Miki caught unaware. He ate no more baits in the trap-houses.
+Even when Le Beau lured him with the whole carcass of a rabbit he
+would not touch it, nor would he touch a rabbit frozen dead in a
+snare. From Le Beau's traps he took only the living things,
+chiefly birds and squirrels and the big web-footed snowshoe
+rabbits. And because a mink jumped at him once, and tore open his
+nose, he destroyed a number of minks so utterly that their pelts
+were spoiled. He found himself another windfall, but instinct
+taught him now never to go to it directly, but to approach it, and
+leave it, in a roundabout way.
+
+Day and night Le Beau, the man-brute, plotted against him. He set
+many poison-baits. He killed a doe, and scattered strychnine in
+its entrails. He built deadfalls, and baited them with meat soaked
+in boiling fat. He made himself a "blind" of spruce and cedar
+boughs, and sat for long hours, watching with his rifle. And still
+Miki was the victor.
+
+One day Miki found a huge fisher-cat in one of the traps. He had
+not forgotten the battle of long ago with Oochak, the other
+fisher-cat, or the whipping he had received. But there was no
+thought of vengeance in his heart on the early evening he became
+acquainted with Oochak the Second. Usually he was in his windfall
+at dusk, but this afternoon a great and devouring loneliness had
+held him on the trail. The spirit of Kuskayetum--the hand of the
+mating-god--was pressing heavily upon him; the consuming desire of
+flesh and blood for the companionship of other flesh and blood. It
+burned in his veins like a fever. It took away from him all
+thought of hunger or of the hunt. In his soul was a vast, unfilled
+yearning.
+
+It was then that he came upon Oochak. Perhaps it was the same
+Oochak of months ago. If so, he had grown even as Miki had grown.
+He was splendid, with his long silken fur and his sleek body, and
+he was not struggling, but sat awaiting his fate without
+excitement. To Miki he looked warm and soft and comfortable. It
+made him think of Neewa, and the hundred and one nights they had
+slept together. His desire leapt out to Oochak. He whined softly
+as he advanced. He would make friends. Even with Oochak, his old
+enemy, he would lie down in peace and happiness, so great was the
+gnawing emptiness in his heart.
+
+Oochak made no response, nor did he move, but sat furred up like a
+huge soft ball, watching Miki as he crept nearer on his belly.
+Something of the old puppishness came back into the dog. He
+wriggled and thumped his tail, and as he whined again he seemed to
+say.
+
+"Let's forget the old trouble, Oochak. Let's be friends. I've got
+a fine windfall--and I'll kill you a rabbit."
+
+And still Oochak did not move or make a sound. At last Miki could
+almost reach out with his forepaws and touch him. He dragged
+himself still nearer, and his tail thumped harder.
+
+"And I'll get you out of the trap," he may have been saying. "It's
+the man-beast's trap--and I hate him."
+
+And then, so suddenly that Miki had no chance to guard himself,
+Oochak sprang the length of the trap-chain and was at him. With
+teeth and razor-edged claws he tore deep gashes in Miki's nose.
+Even then the blood of battle rose slowly in him, and he might
+have retreated had not Oochak's teeth got a hold in his shoulder.
+With a roar he tried to shake himself free, but Oochak held on.
+Then his jaws snapped at the back of the fisher-cat's neck. When
+he was done Oochak was dead.
+
+He slunk away, but in him there was no more the thrill of the
+victor. He had killed, but in killing he had found no joy. Upon
+him--the four-footed beast--had fallen at last the oppression of
+the thing that drives men mad. He stood in the heart of a vast
+world, and for him that world was empty. He was an outcast. His
+heart crying out for comradeship, he found that all things feared
+him or hated him. He was a pariah; a wanderer without a friend or
+a home. He did not reason these things but the gloom of them
+settled upon him like black night.
+
+He did not return to his windfall. In a little open he sat on his
+haunches, listening to the night sounds, and watching the stars as
+they came out. There was an early moon, and as it came up over the
+forest, a great throbbing red disc that seemed filled with life,
+he howled mournfully in the face of it. He wandered out into a big
+burn a little later, and there the night was like day, so clear
+that his shadow followed him and all other things about him cast
+shadows, And then, all at once, he caught in the night wind a
+sound which he had heard many times before.
+
+It came from far away, and it was like a whisper at first, an echo
+of strange voices riding on the wind, A hundred times he had heard
+that cry of the wolves. Since Maheegun, the she-wolf, had gashed
+his shoulder so fiercely away back in the days of his puppyhood
+he had evaded the path of that cry. He had learned, in a way, to
+hate it. But he could not wipe out entirely the thrill that came
+with that call of the blood. And to-night it rode over all his
+fear and hatred. Out there was COMPANY. Whence the cry came the
+wild brethren were running two by two, and three by three, and
+there was COMRADESHIP. His body quivered. An answering cry rose in
+his throat, dying away in a whine, and for an hour after that he
+heard no more of the wolf-cry in the wind. The pack had swung to
+the west--so far away that their voices were lost. And it passed--
+with the moon straight over them--close to the shack of Pierrot,
+the halfbreed.
+
+In Pierrot's cabin was a white man, on his way to Fort O' God. He
+saw that Pierrot crossed himself, and muttered.
+
+"It is the mad pack," explained Pierrot then. "M'sieu, they have
+been KESKWAO since the beginning of the new moon. In them are the
+spirits of devils."
+
+He opened the cabin door a little, so that the mad cry of the
+beasts came to them plainly. When he closed it there was in his
+eyes a look of strange fear.
+
+"Now and then wolves go like that--KESKWAO (stark mad)--in the
+dead of winter," he shuddered. "Three days ago there were twenty
+of them, m'sieu, for I saw them with my own eyes, and counted
+their tracks in the snow. Since then they been murdered and torn
+into strings by the others of the pack. Listen to them ravin'! Can
+you tell me why, m'sieu? Can you tell me why wolves sometimes go
+mad in the heart of winter when there is no heat or rotten meat to
+turn them sick? NON? But I can tell you. They are the loups-
+garous; in their bodies ride the spirits of devils, and there they
+will ride until the bodies die. For the wolves that go mad in the
+deep snows always die, m'sieu. That is the strange part of it.
+THEY DIE!"
+
+And then it was, swinging eastward from the cabin of Pierrot, that
+the mad wolves of Jackson's Knee came into the country of the big
+swamp wherein trees bore the Double-X blaze of Jacques Le Beau's
+axe. There were fourteen of them running in the moonlight. What it
+is that now and then drives a wolf-pack mad in the dead of winter
+no man yet has wholly learned. Possibly it begins with a "bad"
+wolf; just as a "bad" sledge-dog, nipping and biting his fellows,
+will spread his distemper among them until the team becomes an
+ugly, quarrelsome horde. Such a dog the wise driver kills--or
+turns loose.
+
+The wolves that bore down upon Le Beau's country were red-eyed and
+thin. Their bodies were covered with gashes, and the mouths of
+some frothed blood. They did not run as wolves run for meat. They
+were a sinister and suspicious lot, with a sneaking droop to their
+haunches, and their cry was not the deep-throated cry of the hunt-
+pack but a ravening clamour that seemed to have no leadership or
+cause. Scarcely was the sound of their tongues gone beyond the
+hearing of Pierrot's ears than one of the thin gray beasts rubbed
+against the shoulder of another, and the second turned with the
+swiftness of a snake, like the "bad" dog of the traces, and struck
+his fangs deep into the first wolf's flesh. Could Pierrot have
+seen, he would have understood then how the four he had found had
+come to their end.
+
+Swift as the snap of a whip-lash the fight between the two was on.
+The other twelve of the pack stopped. They came back, circling in
+cautiously and grimly silent about their fighting comrades. They
+ranged themselves in a ring, as men gather about a fistic battle;
+and there they waited, their jaws drooling, their fangs clicking,
+a low and eager whining smothered in their throats. And then the
+thing happened. One of the fighting wolves went down. He was on
+his back--and the end came. The twelve wolves were upon him as
+one, and, like those Pierrot had seen, he was torn to pieces, and
+his flesh devoured. After that the thirteen went on deeper into Le
+Beau's country.
+
+Miki heard them again, after that hour's interval of silence.
+Farther and farther he had wandered from the forest. He had
+crossed the "burn," and was in the open plain, with the rough
+ridges cutting through and the big river at the edge of it. It was
+not so gloomy out here, and his loneliness weighed upon him less
+heavily than in the deep timber.
+
+And across this plain came the voice of the wolves.
+
+He did not move away from it to-night. He waited, silhouetted
+against the vivid starlight at the crest of a rocky knoll, and the
+top of this knoll was so small that another could not have stood
+beside him without their shoulders touching. On all sides of him
+the plain swept away in the white light of the stars and moon;
+never had the desire to respond to the wild brethren urged itself
+upon him more fiercely than now. He flung back his head, until his
+black-tipped muzzle pointed up to the stars, and the voice rolled
+out of his throat. But it was only half a howl. Even then,
+oppressed by his great loneliness, there gripped him that
+something instinctive which warned him against betrayal. After
+that he remained quiet, and as the wolves drew nearer his body
+grew tense, his muscles hardened, and in his throat there was the
+low whispering of a snarl instead of a howl. He sensed danger. He
+had caught, in the voice of the wolves, the ravening note that had
+made Pierrot cross himself and mutter of the loups-garous, and he
+crouched down on his belly at the top of the rocky mound.
+
+Then he saw them. They were sweeping like dark and swiftly moving
+shadows between him and the forest. Suddenly they stopped, and for
+a few moments no sound came from them as they packed themselves
+closely on the scent of his fresh trail in the snow. And then they
+surged in his direction; this time there was a still fiercer
+madness in the wild cry that rose from their throats. In a dozen
+seconds they were at the mound. They swept around it and past it,
+all save one--a huge gray brute who shot up the hillock straight
+at the prey the others had not yet seen. There was a snarl in
+Miki's throat as he came. Once more he was facing the thrill of a
+great fight. Once more the blood ran suddenly hot in his veins,
+and fear was driven from him as the wind drives smoke from a fire.
+If Neewa were only there now, to fend at his back while he fought
+in front! He stood up on his feet. He met the up-rushing pack-
+brute head to head. Their jaws clashed, and the wild wolf found
+jaws at last that crunched through his own as if they had been
+whelp's bone, and he rolled and twisted back to the plain in a
+dying agony. But not until another gray form had come to fill his
+place. Into the throat of this second Miki drove his fangs as the
+wolf came over the crest. It was the slashing, sabre-like stroke
+of the north-dog, and the throat of the wolf was torn open and the
+blood poured out as if emptied by the blade of a knife. Down he
+plunged to join the first, and in that instant the pack swept up
+and over Miki, and he was smothered under the mass of their
+bodies. Had two or three attacked him at once he would have died
+as quickly as the first two of his enemies had come to their end.
+Numbers saved him in the first rush. On the level of the plain he
+would have been torn into pieces like a bit of cloth, but on the
+space at the top of the KOPJE, no larger than the top of a table,
+he was lost for a few seconds under the snarling and rending horde
+of his enemies. Fangs intended for him sank into other wolf-flesh;
+the madness of the pack became a blind rage, and the assault upon
+Miki turned into a slaughter of the wolves themselves. On his
+back, held down by the weight of bodies, Miki drove his fangs
+again and again into flesh. A pair of jaws seized him in the
+groin, and a shock of agony swept through him. It was a death-
+grip, sinking steadily into his vitals. Just in time another pair
+of jaws seized the wolf who held him, and the hold in his groin
+gave way. In that moment Miki felt himself plunging down the steep
+side of the knoll, and after him came a half of what was left
+alive of the pack.
+
+The fighting devils in Miki's brain gave way all at once to that
+cunning of the fox which had served him even more than claw and
+fang in times of great danger. Scarcely had he reached the plain
+before he was on his feet, and no sooner had he touched his feet
+than he was off like the wind in direction of the river. He had
+gained a fifty-yard start before the first of the wolves
+discovered his flight. There were only eight that followed him
+now. Of the thirteen mad beasts five were dead or dying at the
+foot of the hillock. Of these Miki had slain two. The others had
+fallen at the fangs of their own brethren.
+
+Half a mile away were the steep cliffs of the river, and at the
+edge of these cliffs was a great cairn of rocks in which for one
+night Miki had sought shelter. He had not forgotten the tunnel
+into the tumbled mass of rock debris, nor how easily it could be
+defended from within. Once in that tunnel he would turn in the
+door of it and slaughter his enemies one by one, for only one by
+one could they attack him. But he had not reckoned with that huge
+gray form behind him that might have been named Lightning, the
+fiercest and swiftest of all the mad wolves of the pack. He sped
+ahead of his slower-footed companions like a streak of light, and
+Miki had made but half the distance to the cairn when he heard the
+panting breath of Lightning behind him. Even Hela, his father,
+could not have run more swiftly than Miki, but great as was Miki's
+speed, Lightning ran more swiftly. Two thirds of the distance to
+the cliff and the huge wolf's muzzle was at Miki's flank. With a
+burst of speed Miki gained a little. Then steadily Lightning drew
+abreast of him, a grim and merciless shadow of doom.
+
+A hundred yards farther on and a little to the right was the
+cairn. But Miki could not run to the right without turning into
+Lightning's jaws, and he realized now that if he reached the cairn
+his enemy would be upon him before he could dive into the tunnel
+and face about. To stop and fight would be death, for behind he
+could hear the other wolves. Ten seconds more and the chasm of the
+river yawned ahead of them.
+
+At its very brink Miki swung and struck at Lightning. He sensed
+death now, and in the face of death all his hatred turned upon the
+one beast that had run at his side. In an instant they were down.
+Two yards from the edge of the cliff, and Miki's jaws were at
+Lightning's throat when the pack rushed upon them. They were swept
+onward. The earth flew out from under their feet, and they were in
+space. Grimly Miki held to the throat of his foe. Over and over
+they twisted in mid-air, and then came a terrific shock. Lightning
+was under. Yet so great was the shock, that, even though the
+wolf's huge body was under him like a cushion, Miki was stunned
+and dazed. A minute passed before he staggered to his feet.
+Lightning lay still, the life smashed out of him. A little beyond
+him lay the bodies of two other wolves that in their wild rush had
+swept over the cliff.
+
+Miki looked up. Between him and the stars he could see the top of
+the cliff, a vast distance above him. One after the other he
+smelled at the bodies of the three dead wolves. Then he limped
+slowly along the base of the cliff until he came to a fissure
+between two huge rocks. Into this he crept and lay down, licking
+his wounds. After all there were worse things in the world than Le
+Beau's trapline. Perhaps there were even worse things than men.
+
+After a time he stretched his great head out between his fore-
+paws, and slowly the starlight grew dimmer, and the snow less
+white, and he slept.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIFTEEN
+
+
+In a twist of Three Jackpine River, buried in the deep of the
+forest between the Shamattawa country and Hudson Bay, was the
+cabin in which lived Jacques Le Beau, the trapper. There was not
+another man in all that wilderness who was the equal of Le Beau in
+wickedness--unless it was Durant, who hunted foxes a hundred miles
+north, and who was Jacques's rival in several things. A giant in
+size, with a heavy, sullen face and eyes which seemed but half-
+hidden greenish loopholes for the pitiless soul within him--if he
+had a soul at all--Le Beau was a "throw-back" of the worst sort.
+In their shacks and teepees the Indians whispered softly that all
+the devils of his forebears had gathered in him.
+
+It was a grim kind of fate that had given to Le Beau a wife. Had
+she been a witch, an evil-doer and an evil-thinker like himself,
+the thing would not have been such an abortion of what should have
+been. But she was not that. Sweet-faced, with something of unusual
+beauty still in her pale cheeks and starving eyes--trembling at
+his approach and a slave in his presence--she was, like his dogs,
+the PROPERTY of The Brute. And the woman had a baby. One had
+already died; and it was the thought that this one might die, as
+the other had died, that brought at times the new flash of fire
+into her dark eyes.
+
+"Le bon Dieu--I pray to the Blessed Angels--I swear you SHALL
+live!" she would cry to it at times, hugging it close to her
+breast. And it was at these times that the fire came into her
+eyes, and her pale cheeks flushed with a smouldering bit of the
+flame that had once been her beauty. "Some day--SOME DAY--"
+
+But she never finished, even to the child, what was in her mind.
+Sometimes her dreams were filled with visions. The world was still
+young, and SHE was not old. She was thinking of that as she stood
+before the cracked bit of mirror in the cabin, brushing out her
+hair, that was black and shining and so long that it fell to her
+hips. Of her beauty her hair had remained. It was defiant of The
+Brute. And deep back in her eyes, and in her face, there were
+still the living, hidden traces of her girlhood heritage ready to
+bloom again if Fate, mending its error at last, would only take
+away forever the crushing presence of the Master. She stood a
+little longer before the bit of glass when she heard the crunching
+of footsteps in the snow outside.
+
+Swiftly what had been in her face was gone. Le Beau had been away
+on his trapline since yesterday, and his return filled her with
+the old dread. Twice he had caught her before the mirror and had
+called her vile names for wasting her time in admiring herself
+when she might have been scraping the fat from his pelts. The
+second time he had sent her reeling back against the wall, and had
+broken the mirror until the bit she treasured now was not much
+larger than her two slim hands. She would not be caught again. She
+ran with the glass to the place where she kept it in hiding, and
+then quickly she wove the heavy strands of her hair into a braid.
+The strange, dead look of fear and foreboding closed like a veil
+over the secrets her eyes had disclosed to herself. She turned, as
+she always turned in her woman's hope and yearning, to greet him
+when he entered.
+
+The Brute entered, a dark and surly monster. He was in a wicked
+humour. His freshly caught furs he flung to the floor. He pointed
+to them, and his eyes were narrowed to menacing slits as they fell
+upon her.
+
+"He was there again--that devil!" he growled. "See, he has spoiled
+the fisher, and he has cleaned out my baits and knocked down the
+trap-houses. Par les mille cornes du diable, but I will kill him!
+I have sworn to cut him into bits with a knife when I catch him--
+and catch him I will, to-morrow. See to it there--the skins--when
+you have got me something to eat. Mend the fisher where he is torn
+in two, and cover the seam well with fat so that the agent over at
+the post will not discover it is bad. Tonnerre de Dieu!--that
+brat! Why do you always keep his squalling until I come in? Answer
+me, Bete!"
+
+Such was his greeting. He flung his snowshoes into a corner,
+stamped the snow off his feet, and got himself a fresh plug of
+black tobacco from a shelf over the stove. Then he went out again,
+leaving the woman with a cold tremble in her heart and the wan
+desolation of hopelessness in her face as she set about getting
+him food.
+
+From the cabin Le Beau went to his dog-pit, a corral of saplings
+with a shelter-shack in the centre of it. It was The Brute's boast
+that he had the fiercest pack of sledge-dogs between Hudson Bay
+and the Athabasca. It was his chief quarrel with Durant, his rival
+farther north; and his ambition was to breed a pup that would kill
+the fighting husky which Durant brought down to the Post with him
+each winter at New Year. This season he had chosen Netah ("The
+Killer") for the big fight at God's Lake. On the day he would
+gamble his money and his reputation against Durant's, his dog
+would be just one month under two years of age. It was Netah he
+called from out of the pack now.
+
+The dog slunk to him with a low growl in his throat, and for the
+first time something like joy shone in Le Beau's face. He loved to
+hear that growl. He loved to see the red and treacherous glow in
+Netah's eyes, and hear the menacing click of his jaws. Whatever of
+nobility might have been in Netah's blood had been clubbed out by
+the man. They were alike, in that their souls were dead. And
+Netah, for a dog, was a devil. For that reason Le Beau had chosen
+him to fight the big fight.
+
+Le Beau looked down at him, and drew a deep breath of
+satisfaction.
+
+"OW! but you are looking fine, Netah," he exulted. "I can almost
+see running blood in those devil-eyes of yours; OUI--red blood
+that smells and runs, as the blood of Durant's POOS shall run when
+you sink those teeth in its jugular. And to-morrow we are going to
+give you the test--such a beautiful test!--with the wild dog that
+is robbing my traps and tearing my fishers into bits. For I will
+catch him, and you shall fight him until he is almost dead; and
+then I shall cut his heart out alive, as I have promised, and you
+will eat it while it is still beating, so that there will be no
+excuse for your losing to that POOS which M'sieu Durant will bring
+down. COMPRENEZ? It will be a beautiful test--to-morrow. And if
+you fail I will kill you. OUI; if you so much as let a whimper out
+of you, I will kill you--dead."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIXTEEN
+
+
+That same night, ten miles to the west, Miki slept under a
+windfall of logs and treetops not more than half a mile from Le
+Beau's trapline.
+
+In the early dawn, when Le Beau left his cabin, accompanied by
+Netah, The Killer, Miki came out from under his windfall after a
+night of troublous dreams. He had dreamed of those first weeks
+after he had lost his master, when Neewa was always at his side;
+and the visions that had come to him filled him with an uneasiness
+and a loneliness that made him whine as he stood watching the dark
+shadows fading away before the coming of day. Could Le Beau have
+seen him there, as the first of the cold sun struck upon him, the
+words which he had repeated over and over to The Killer would have
+stuck in his throat. For at eleven months of age Miki was a young
+giant of his breed. He weighed sixty pounds, and none of that
+sixty was fat. His body was as slim and as lean as a wolf's. His
+chest was massive, and over it the muscles rolled like BABICHE
+cord when he moved. His legs were like the legs of Hela, the big
+Mackenzie hound who was his father; and with his jaws he could
+crack a caribou bone as Le Beau might have cracked it with a
+stone. For eight of the eleven months of his life the wilderness
+had been his master; it had tempered him to the hardness of living
+steel; it had wrought him without abeyance to age in the mould of
+its pitiless schooling--had taught him to fight for his life, to
+kill that he might live, and to use his brain before he used his
+jaws. He was as powerful as Netah, The Killer, who was twice his
+age, and with his strength he possessed a cunning and a quickness
+which The Killer would never know. Thus had the raw wilderness
+prepared him for this day.
+
+As the sun fired up the forest with a cold flame Miki set off in
+direction of Le Beau's trapline. He came to where Le Beau had
+passed yesterday and sniffed suspiciously of the man-smell that
+was still strong in the snowshoe tracks. He had become accustomed
+to this smell, but he had not lost his suspicion of it. It was
+repugnant to him, even as it fascinated him. It filled him with an
+inexplicable fear, and yet he found himself powerless to run away
+from it. Three times in the last ten days he had seen the man-
+brute himself. Once he had been hiding within a dozen yards of Le
+Beau when he passed.
+
+This morning he headed straight for the swamp through which Le
+Beau's traps were set. There the rabbits were thickest and it was
+in the swamp that they most frequently got in Jacques's KEKEKS--
+the little houses he built of sticks and cedar boughs to keep the
+snow off his baits. They were so numerous that they were a pest,
+and each time that Le Beau made his trip over the line he found at
+least two out of every three traps sprung by them, and therefore
+made useless for the catching of fur. But, where there were many
+rabbits there were also fishers and lynx, and in spite of the rage
+which the plague of rabbits sent him into, Le Beau continued to
+set his traps there. And now, in addition to the rabbits, he had
+the wild dog to contend with.
+
+His heart was fired by a vengeful anticipation as he hurried on
+through the glow of the early sun, with The Killer at his heels,
+led by a BABICHE thong. Miki was nosing about the first trap-house
+as Netah and Le Beau entered the edge of the swamp, three miles to
+the east.
+
+It was in this KEKEK that Miki had killed the fisher-cat the
+previous morning. It was empty now. Even the bait-peg was gone,
+and there was no sign of a trap. A quarter of a mile farther on he
+came to a second trap-house, and this also was empty. He was a bit
+puzzled. And then he went on to the third house. He stood for
+several minutes, sniffing the air still more suspiciously, before
+he drew close to it. The man-tracks were thicker here. The snow
+was beaten down with them, and the scent of Le Beau was so strong
+in the air that for a space Miki believed he was near. Then he
+advanced so that he got a look into the door of the trap-house.
+Squatted there, staring at him with big round eyes, was a huge
+snowshoe rabbit. A premonition of danger held Miki back. It was
+something in the attitude of Wapoos, the old rabbit. He was not
+like the others he had caught along Le Beau's line. He was not
+struggling in a trap; he was not stretched out, half frozen, and
+he was not dangling at the end of a snare. He was all furred up
+into a warm and comfortable looking ball. As a matter of fact, Le
+Beau had caught him with his hands in a hollow log, and had tied
+him to the bait peg with a piece of buck-skin string; and after
+that, just out of Wapoos's reach, he had set a nest of traps and
+covered them with snow.
+
+Nearer and nearer to this menace drew Miki, in spite of the
+unaccountable impulse that warned him to keep back. Wapoos,
+fascinated by his slow and deadly advance, made no movement, but
+sat as if frozen into stone. Then Miki was at him. His powerful
+jaws closed with a crunch. In the same instant there came the
+angry snap of steel and a fisher-trap closed on one of his hind
+feet. With a snarl he dropped Wapoos and turned upon it, SNAP--
+SNAP--SNAP went three more of Jacques's nest of traps. Two of them
+missed. The third caught him by a front paw. As he had caught
+Wapoos, and as he had killed the fisher-cat, so now he seized this
+new and savage enemy between his jaws. His fangs crunched on the
+cold steel; he literally tore it from his paw so that blood
+streamed forth and strained the snow red. Madly he twisted himself
+to get at his hind foot. On this foot the fisher-trap had secured
+a hold that was unbreakable. He ground it between his jaws until
+the blood ran from his mouth. He was fighting it when Le Beau came
+out from behind a clump of spruce twenty yards away with The
+Killer at his heels.
+
+The Brute stopped. He was panting, and his eyes were aflame. Two
+hundred yards away he had heard the clinking of the trap-chain.
+
+"OW! he is there," he gasped, tightening his hold on The Killer's
+lead thong. "He is there, Netah, you Red Eye! That is the robber
+devil you are to kill--almost. I will unfasten you, and then--GO
+TO!"
+
+Miki, no longer fighting the trap, was eyeing them as they
+advanced. In this moment of peril he felt no fear of the man. In
+his veins the hot blood raged with a killing madness. The truth
+leapt upon him in a flash of instinctive awakening. These two were
+his enemies instead of the thing on his foot--the man-beast, and
+Netah, The Killer. He remembered--as if it were yesterday. This
+was not the first time he had seen a man with a club in his hand.
+And Le Beau held a club. But he was not afraid. His steady eyes
+watched Netah. Unleashed by his master, The Killer stood on stiff
+legs a dozen feet away, the wiry crest along his spine erect, his
+muscles tense.
+
+Miki heard the man-beast's voice.
+
+"Go to, you devil! GO TO!"
+
+Miki waited, without the quiver of a muscle. Thus much he had
+learned of his hard lessons in the wilderness--to wait, and watch,
+and use his cunning. He was flat on his belly, his nose between
+his forepaws. His lips were drawn back a little, just a little;
+but he made no sound, and his eyes were as steady as two points of
+flame. Le Beau stared. He felt suddenly a new thrill, and it was
+not the thrill of his desire for vengeance. Never had he seen a
+lynx or a fox or a wolf in a trap like that. Never had he seen a
+dog with eyes like the eyes that were on Netah. For a moment he
+held his breath.
+
+Foot by foot, and then almost inch by inch, The Killer crept in.
+Ten feet, eight, six--and all that time Miki made no move, never
+winked an eye. With a snarl like that of a tiger, Netah came at
+him.
+
+What happened then was the most marvellous thing that Jacques Le
+Beau had ever seen. So swiftly that his eyes could scarcely follow
+the movement, Miki had passed like a flash under the belly of
+Netah, and turning then at the end of his trap chain he was at The
+Killer's throat before Le Beau could have counted ten. They were
+down, and The Brute gripped the club in his hand and stared like
+one fascinated. He heard the grinding crunch of jaws, and he knew
+they were the Wild Dog's jaws; he heard a snarl choking slowly
+into a wheezing sob of agony, and he knew that the sound came from
+The Eller. The blood rose into his face. The red fire in his eyes
+grew livid--a blaze of exultation, of triumph.
+
+"TONNERRE DE DIEU! he is choking the life out of Netah!" he
+gasped. "NON, I have never seen a dog like that. I will keep him
+alive; and he shall fight Durant's POOS over at Post Fort O' God!
+By the belly of Saint Gris, I say--"
+
+The Killer was as good as dead if left another minute. With
+upraised club Le Beau advanced. As he sank his fangs deeper into
+Netah's throat Miki saw the new danger out of the corner of his
+eye. He loosed his jaws and swung himself free of The Killer as
+the club descended. He only partly evaded the smashing blow, which
+caught him on the shoulder and knocked him down. Quick as a flash
+he was on his feet and had lunged at Le Beau. The Frenchman was a
+master with the club. All his life he had used it, and he brought
+it around in a sudden side-swing that landed with terrific force
+against Miki's head. The blood spurted from his mouth and
+nostrils. He was dazed and half blinded. He leapt again, and the
+club caught him once more. He heard Le Beau's ferocious cry of
+joy. A third, a fourth, and a fifth time he went down under the
+club, and Le Beau no longer laughed, but swung his weapon with a
+look that was half fear in his eyes. The sixth time the club
+missed, and Miki's jaws closed against The Brute's chest, ripping
+away the thick coat and shirt as if they had been of paper, and
+leaving on Le Beau's skin a bleeding gash. Ten inches more--a
+little better vision in his blood-dimmed eyes--and he would have
+reached the man's throat. A great cry rose out of Le Beau. For an
+instant he felt the appalling nearness of death.
+
+"Netah! Netah!" he cried, and swung the club wildly.
+
+Netah did not respond. It may be that in this moment he sensed the
+fact that it was his master who had made him into a monster. About
+him was the wilderness, opening its doors of freedom. When Le Beau
+called again The Killer was slinking away, dripping blood as he
+went--and this was the last that Le Beau saw of him. Probably he
+joined the wolves, for The Killer was a quarter-strain wild.
+
+Le Beau got no more than a glimpse of him as he disappeared. His
+club-arm shot out again, a clean miss; and this time it was pure
+chance that saved him. The trap-chain caught, and Miki fell back
+when his hot breath was almost at The Brute's jugular. He fell
+upon his side. Before he could recover himself the club was
+pounding his head into the snow. The world grew black. He no
+longer had the power to move. Lying as if dead he still heard over
+him the panting, exultant voice of the man-beast. For Le Beau,
+black though his heart was, could not keep back a prayerful cry of
+thankfulness that he was victor--and had missed death, though by a
+space no wider than the link of a chain.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
+
+
+Nanette, the woman, saw Jacques come out of the edge of the timber
+late in the afternoon, dragging something on the snow behind him.
+In her heart, ever since her husband had begun to talk about him,
+she had kept secret to herself a pity for the wild dog. Long
+before the last baby had come she had loved a dog. It was this dog
+that had given her the only real affection she had known in the
+company of The Brute, and with barbarous cruelty Le Beau had
+driven it from her. Nanette herself had encouraged it to seek
+freedom in the wilderness, as Netah had at last sought his.
+Therefore she had prayed that the wild dog of the trapline might
+escape.
+
+As Le Beau came nearer she saw that what he drew after him upon
+the snow was a sledge-drag made of four lengths of sapling, and
+when, a moment later, she looked down at its burden, she gave a
+little cry of horror.
+
+Miki's four feet were tied so firmly to the pieces of sapling that
+he could not move. A cord about his neck was fastened to one of
+the crossbars, and over his jaws Le Beau had improvised a muzzle
+of unbreakable BABICHE thong. He had done all this before Miki
+regained consciousness after the clubbing. The woman stared, and
+there was a sudden catch in her breath after the little cry that
+had fallen from her lips. Many times she had seen Jacques club his
+dogs, but never had she seen one clubbed like this. Miki's head
+and shoulders were a mass of frozen blood. And then she saw his
+eyes. They were looking straight up at her. She turned, fearing
+that Jacques might see what was in her face.
+
+Le Beau dragged his burden straight into the cabin, and then stood
+back and rubbed his hands as he looked at Miki on the floor.
+Nanette saw that he was in a strangely good humour, and waited.
+
+"By the Blessed Saints, but you should have seen him kill Netah--
+almost," he exulted. "OUI; he had him down by the throat quicker
+than you could flash your eye, and twice he was within an inch of
+my life when I fought him with the club. DIEU! I say, what will
+happen to Durant's dog when they meet at Post Fort 0' God? I will
+make a side wager that he kills him before the second-hand of LE
+FACTEUR'S watch, goes round twice. He is splendid! Watch him,
+Nanette, while I go make a corral for him alone. If I put him in
+with the pack he will kill them all."
+
+Miki's eyes followed him as he disappeared through the cabin door.
+Then he looked swiftly back to Nanette. She had drawn nearer. Her
+eyes were shining as she bent over him. A snarl rose in Miki's
+throat, and died there. For the first time he was looking upon
+WOMAN. He sensed, all at once, a difference as vast as the world
+itself. In his bruised and broken body his heart stood still.
+Nanette spoke to him. Never in his life had he heard a voice like
+hers--soft and gentle, with a breaking sob in it; and then--
+miracle of miracles--she had dropped on her knees and her hands
+were at his head!
+
+In that instant his spirit leapt back through the generations--
+back beyond his father, and his father's father; back to that far
+day when the blood in the veins of his race was "just dog," and he
+romped with children, and listened to the call of woman, and
+worshipped at the shrine of humankind. And now the woman had run
+quickly to the stove, and was back again with a dish of warm water
+and a soft cloth, and was bathing his head, talking to him all the
+time in that gentle, half-sobbing voice of pity and of love. He
+closed his eyes--no longer afraid. A great sigh heaved out of his
+body. He wanted to put out his tongue and lick the slim white
+hands that were bringing him peace and comfort. And then the
+strangest thing of all happened. In the crib the baby sat up and
+began to prattle. It was a new note to Miki, a new song of Life's
+spring-tide to him, but it thrilled him as nothing else in all the
+world had ever thrilled him before. He opened his eyes wide--and
+whined.
+
+A laugh of joy--new and strange even to herself--came into the
+woman's voice, and she ran to the crib and returned with the baby
+in her arms. She knelt down beside him again, and the baby, at
+sight of this strange plaything on the floor, thrust out its
+little arms, and kicked its tiny moccasined feet, and cooed and
+laughed and squirmed until Miki strained at his thongs to get a
+little nearer that he might touch this wonderful creature with his
+nose. He forgot his pain. He no longer sensed the agony of his
+bruised and beaten jaws. He did not feel the numbness of his
+tightly bound and frozen legs. Every instinct in him was centred
+in these two.
+
+And the woman, now, was beautiful. She UNDERSTOOD; and the gentle
+heart throbbed in her bosom, forgetful of The Brute. Her eyes
+glowed with the soft radiance of stars. Into her pale cheeks came
+a sweet flush. She sat the baby down, and with the cloth and warm
+water continued to bathe Miki's head. Le Beau, had he been human,
+must have worshipped her then as she knelt there, all that was
+pure and beautiful in motherhood, an angel of mercy, radiant for a
+moment in her forgetfulness of HIM. And Le Beau DID enter--and see
+her--so quietly that for a space she did not realize his presence;
+and with him staring down on her she continued to talk and laugh
+and half sob, and the baby kicked and prattled and flung out its
+little arms wildly in the joy of these exciting moments.
+
+Le Beau's thick lips drew back in an ugly leer, and he gave a
+savage curse. Nanette flinched as if struck a blow.
+
+"Get up, you fool!" he snarled.
+
+She obeyed, shrinking back with the baby in her arms. Miki saw the
+change, and the greenish fire returned into his eyes when he
+caught sight of Le Beau. A deep and wolfish snarl rose in his
+throat.
+
+Le Beau turned on Nanette. The glow and the flush had not quite
+gone from her eyes and cheeks as she stood with the baby hugged up
+to her breast, and her big shining braid had fallen over her
+shoulder, glistening with a velvety fire in the light that came
+through the western window. But Le Beau saw nothing of this.
+
+"If you make a POOS (a house-kitten) of that dog--a thing like you
+made of Minoo, the breed-bitch, I will--"
+
+He did not finish, but his huge hands were clinched, and there was
+an ugly passion in his eyes. Nanette needed no more than that. She
+understood. She had received many blows, but there was the memory
+of one that never left her, night or day. Some day, if she could
+ever get to Post Fort O' God, and had the courage, she would tell
+LE FACTEUR of that blow--how Jacques Le Beau, her husband, struck
+it at the nursing time, and her bosom was so hurt that the baby of
+two years ago had died. She would tell it, when she knew she and
+the baby would be safe from the vengeance of the Brute. And only
+LE FACTEUR--the Big Man at Post Fort O' God a hundred miles away--
+was powerful enough to save her.
+
+It was well that Le Beau did not read this thought in her mind
+now. With his warning he turned to Miki and dragged him out of the
+cabin to a cage made of saplings in which the winter before he had
+kept two live foxes. A small chain ten feet in length he fastened
+around Miki's neck and then to one of the sapling bars before he
+thrust his prisoner inside the door of the prison and freed him by
+cutting the BABICHE thongs with a knife.
+
+For several minutes after that Miki lay still while the blood made
+its way slowly through his numbed and half-frozen limbs. At last
+he staggered to his feet, and then it was that Le Beau chuckled
+jubilantly and turned back to the cabin.
+
+And now followed many days that were days of hell and torment for
+him--an unequal struggle between the power of The Brute and the
+spirit of the Dog.
+
+"I must break you--OW! by the Christ! I WILL break you!"--Le Beau
+would say time and again when he came with the club and the whip.
+"I will make you crawl to me--OUI, and when I say fight you will
+fight!"
+
+It was a small cage, so small that Miki could not get away from
+the reach of the club and the whip. They maddened him--for a time,
+and Le Beau's ugly soul was filled with joy as Miki launched
+himself again and again at the sapling bars, tearing at them with
+his teeth and frothing blood like a wolf gone mad. For twenty
+years Le Beau had trained fighting dogs, and this was his way. So
+he had done with Netah until The Killer was mastered, and at his
+call crept to him on his belly.
+
+Three times, from a window in the cabin, Nanette looked forth on
+these horrible struggles between the man and the dog, and the
+third time she buried her face in her arms and sobbed; and when Le
+Beau came in and found her crying he dragged her to the window and
+made her look out again at Miki, who lay bleeding and half dead in
+the cage. It was a morning on which he started the round of his
+traps, and he was always gone until late the following day. And
+never was he more than well out of sight than Nanette would run
+out and go to the cage.
+
+It was then that Miki forgot The Brute. At times so beaten and
+blinded that he could scarcely stand or see, he would crawl to the
+bars of the cage and caress the soft hands that Nanette held in
+fearlessly to him. And then, after a little, Nanette began to
+bring the baby out with her, bundled up like a little Eskimo, and
+in his joy Miki whimpered and wagged his tail and grovelled in his
+worship before these two.
+
+It was in the second week of his captivity that the wonderful
+thing happened. Le Beau was gone, and there was a raging blizzard
+outside to which Nanette dared not expose the baby. So she went to
+the cage, and with a heart that beat wildly, she unbarred the
+door--and brought Miki into the cabin! If Le Beau should ever
+discover what she had done--!
+
+The thought made her shiver.
+
+After this first time she brought him into the cabin again and
+again. Once her heart stood still when Le Beau saw blood on the
+floor, and his eyes shot at her suspiciously. Then she lied.
+
+"I cut my finger she said," and a moment later, with her back to
+him, she DID cut it, and when Jacques looked at her hand he saw a
+cloth about the finger, with blood-stain on it.
+
+After that Nanette always watched the floor carefully.
+
+More and more this cabin, with the woman and the baby in it,
+became a paradise for Miki. Then came the time when Nanette dared
+to keep him in the cabin with her all night, and lying close to
+the precious cradle Miki never once took his eyes from her. It was
+late when she prepared for bed. She changed into a long, soft
+robe, and then, sitting near Miki, with her bare little feet in
+the fireglow, she took down her wonderful hair and began brushing
+it. It was the first time Miki had seen this new and marvellous
+garment about her. It fell over her shoulders and breast and
+almost to the floor in a shimmering glory, and the scent of it was
+so sweet that Miki crept a few inches nearer, and whimpered
+softly. After she had done brushing it Miki watched her as her
+slim fingers plaited it into two braids; and then, before she put
+the light out, a still more curious thing happened. She went to
+her bed, made of saplings, against the wall, and from its hiding
+place under the blankets drew forth tenderly a little ivory
+Crucifix. With this in her hands she knelt upon the log floor, and
+Miki listened to her prayer. He did not know, but she was asking
+God to be good to her baby--the little Nanette in the crib.
+
+After that she cuddled the baby up in her arms, and put out the
+light, and went to bed; and through all the hours of the night
+Miki made no sound that would waken them.
+
+In the morning, when Nanette opened her eyes, she found Miki with
+his head resting on the edge of the bed, close to the baby that
+was nestled against her bosom.
+
+That morning, as she built the fire, something strange and
+stirring in Nanette's breast made her sing. Le Beau would be away
+until dark that night, and she would never dare to tell him what
+she and the baby and the dog were going to do. It was her
+birthday. Twenty-six; and it seemed to her that she had lived the
+time of two lives! And eight of those years with The Brute! But
+to-day they would celebrate, they three. All the morning the cabin
+was filled with a new spirit--a new happiness.
+
+Years ago, before she had met Le Beau, the Indians away back on
+the Waterfound had called Nanette "Tanta Penashe" ("the Little
+Bird") because of the marvellous sweetness of her voice. And this
+morning she sang as she prepared the birthday feast; the sun
+flooded through the windows, and Miki whimpered happily and
+thumped his tail, and the baby cackled and crowed, and The Brute
+was forgotten. In that forgetfulness Nanette was a girl again,
+sweet and beautiful as in those days when old Jackpine, the Cree--
+who was now dead--had told her that she was born of the flowers.
+The wonderful dinner was ready at last, and to the baby's delight
+Nanette induced Miki to sit on a chair at the table. He felt
+foolish there, and he looked so foolish that Nanette laughed until
+her long dark lashes were damp with tears; and then, when Miki
+slunk down from the chair, feeling his shame horribly, she ran to
+him and put her arms around him and pleaded with him until he took
+his place at the table again.
+
+So the day passed until mid-afternoon, when Nanette cleared away
+all signs of the celebration and locked Miki in his cage. It was
+fortunate she was ahead of time, for scarcely was she done when Le
+Beau came into the edge of the clearing, and with him was Durant,
+his acquaintance and rival from the edge of the Barrens farther
+north. Durant had sent his outfit on to Port O' God by an Indian,
+and had struck south and west with two dogs and a sledge to visit
+a cousin for a day or two. He was on his way to the Post when he
+came upon Le Beau on his trapline.
+
+Thus much Le Beau told Nanette, and Nanette looked at Durant with
+startled eyes. They were a good pair, Jacques and his guest, only
+that Durant was older. She had become somewhat accustomed to the
+brutality in Le Beau's face, but she thought that Durant was a
+monster. He made her afraid, and she was glad when they went from
+the cabin.
+
+"Now I will show you the BETE that is going to kill your POOS as
+easily as your lead-whelp killed that rabbit to-day, m'sieu,"
+exulted Jacques. "I have told you but you have not seen!"
+
+And he took with him the club and the whip.
+
+Like a tiger fresh out of the jungles Miki responded to the club
+and the whip to-day, until Durant himself stood aghast, and
+exclaimed under his breath: "MON DIEU! he is a devil!"
+
+From the window Nanette saw what was happening, and out of her
+rose a cry of anguish. Sudden as a burst of fire there arose in
+her--triumphant at last and unafraid--that thing which for years
+The Brute had crushed back: her womanhood resurrected! Her soul
+broken free of its shackles! Her faith, her strength, her courage!
+She turned from the window and ran to the door, and out over the
+snow to the cage; and for the first time in her life she struck at
+Le Beau, and beat fiercely at the arm that was wielding the club.
+
+"You beast!" she cried. "I tell you, you SHALL NOT! Do you hear?
+You SHALL NOT!"
+
+Paralyzed with amazement, The Brute stood still. Was this Nanette,
+his slave? This wonderful creature with eyes that were glowing
+fire and defiance, and a look in her face that he had never seen
+in any woman's face before? NON--impossible! Hot rage rose in him,
+and with a single sweep of his powerful arm he flung her back so
+that she fell to the earth. With a wild curse he lifted the bar of
+the cage door.
+
+"I will kill him, now; I will KILL him!" he almost shrieked. "And
+it is YOU--YOU--you she-devil! who shall eat his heart alive! I
+will force it down your throat: I will--"
+
+He was dragging Miki forth by the chain. The club rose as Miki's
+head came through. In another instant it would have beaten his
+head to a pulp--but Nanette was between it and the dog like a
+flash, and the blow went wild. It was with his fist that Le Beau
+struck out now, and the blow caught Nanette on the shoulder and
+sent her frail body down with a crash. The Brute sprang upon her.
+His fingers gripped in her thick, soft hair.
+
+And then--
+
+From Durant came a warning cry. It was too late. A lean gray
+streak of vengeance and retribution, Miki was at the end of his
+chain and at Le Beau's throat. Nanette HEARD! Through dazed eyes
+she SAW! She reached out gropingly and struggled to her feet, and
+looked just once down upon the snow. Then, with a terrible cry,
+she staggered toward the cabin.
+
+When Durant gathered courage to drag Le Beau out of Miki's reach
+Miki made no movement to harm him. Again, perhaps, it was the
+Beneficent Spirit that told him his duty was done. He went back
+into his cage, and lying there on his belly looked forth at
+Durant.
+
+And Durant, looking at the blood-stained snow and the dead body of
+The Brute, whispered to himself again:
+
+"MON DIEU! he is a devil!"
+
+In the cabin, Nanette was upon her knees before the crucifix.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
+
+
+There are times when death is a shock, but not a grief. And so it
+was with Nanette Le Beau. With her own eyes she had looked upon
+the terrible fate of her husband, and it was not in her gentle
+soul to weep or wish him alive again. At last there had overtaken
+him what LE BON DIEU had intended him to receive some day:
+justice. And for the baby's sake more than her own Nanette was not
+sorry. Durant, whose soul was only a little less wicked than the
+dead man's, had not even waited for a prayer--had not asked her
+what to do. He had chopped a hole in the frozen earth and had
+buried Le Beau almost before his body was cold. And Nanette was
+not sorry for that. The Brute was gone. He was gone for ever. He
+would never strike her again. And because of the baby she offered
+up a prayer of gratitude to God.
+
+In his prison-cage of sapling bars Miki cringed on his belly at
+the end of his chain. He had scarcely moved since those terrible
+moments in which he had torn the life out of the man-brute's
+throat. He had not even growled at Durant when he dragged the body
+away. Upon him had fallen a fearful and overwhelming oppression.
+He was not thinking of his own brutal beatings, or of the death
+which Le Beau had been about to inflict upon him with the club; he
+did not feel the presence of pain in his bruised and battered
+body, nor in his bleeding jaws and whip-lashed eyes. He was
+thinking of Nanette, the woman. Why had she run away with that
+terrible cry when he killed the man-beast? Was it not the man-
+beast who had struck her down, and whose hands were at her white
+throat when he sprang the length of his chain and tore out his
+jugular? Then why was it that she ran away, and did not come back?
+
+He whimpered softly.
+
+The afternoon was almost gone, and the early gloom of mid-winter
+night in the Northland was settling thickly over the forests. In
+that gloom the dark face of Durant appeared at the bars of Miki's
+prison. Instinctively Miki had hated this foxhunter from the edge
+of the Barrens, just as he had hated Le Beau, for in their brutish
+faces as well as in their hearts they were like brothers. Yet he
+did not growl at Durant as he peered through. He did not even
+move.
+
+"UGH! LE DIABLE!" shuddered Durant.
+
+Then he laughed. It was a low, terrible laugh, half smothered in
+his coarse black beard, and it sent an odd chill through Miki.
+
+He turned after that and went into the cabin.
+
+Nanette rose to meet him, her great dark eyes glowing in a face
+dead white. She had not yet risen above the shock of Le Beau's
+tragic death, and yet in those eyes there was already something
+re-born. It had not been there when Durant came to the cabin with
+Le Beau that afternoon. He looked at her strangely as she stood
+with the baby in her arms. She was another Nanette. He felt
+uneasy. Why was it that a few hours ago he had laughed boldly when
+her husband had cursed her and said vile things in her presence--
+and now he could not meet the steady gaze of her eyes? DIEU! he
+had never before observed how lovely she was! He drew himself
+together, and stated the business in his mind.
+
+"You will not want the dog," he said. "I will take him away."
+
+Nanette did not answer. She seemed scarcely to be breathing as she
+looked at him. It seemed to him that she was waiting for him to
+explain; and then the inspiration to lie leapt into his mind.
+
+"You know, there was to be the big fight between HIS dog and mine
+at Post Fort O' God at the New Year carnival," he went on,
+shuffling his heavy feet. "For that, Jacques--your husband--was
+training the wild dog. And when I saw that OOCHUN--that wolf
+devil--tearing at the bars of the cage I knew he would kill my dog
+as a fox kills a rabbit. So we struck a bargain, and for the two
+cross foxes and the ten red which I have outside I bought him."
+(The VRAISEMBLANCE of his lie gave him courage. It sounded like
+truth, and Jacques, the dead man, was not there to repudiate his
+claim.) "So he is mine," he finished a little exultantly, "and I
+will take him to the Post, and will fight him against any dog or
+wolf in all the North. Shall I bring in the skins, MADAME?"
+
+"He is not for sale," said Nanette, the glow in her eyes
+deepening. "He is my dog--mine and the baby's. Do you understand,
+Henri Durant? HE IS NOT FOR SALE!"
+
+"OUI," gasped Durant, amazed.
+
+"And when you reach Post Fort O' God, m'sieu, you will tell LE
+FACTEUR that Jacques is dead, and how he died, and say that some
+one must be sent for the baby and me. We will stay here until
+then."
+
+"OUI," said Durant again, backing to the door.
+
+He had never seen her like that. He wondered how Jacques Le Beau
+could swear at her, and strike her. For himself, he was afraid.
+Standing there with those wonderful eyes and white face, with the
+baby in her arms, and her shining hair over her breasts, she made
+him think of a picture he had once seen of the Blessed Lady.
+
+He went out through the door and back to the sapling cage where
+Miki lay. Softly he spoke through the bars.
+
+"OW, BETE" he called; "she will not sell you. She keeps you
+because you fought for her, and killed MON AMI, Jacques Le Beau.
+And so I must take you my own way. In a little while the moon will
+be up, and then I will slip a noose over your head at the end of a
+pole, and will choke you so quickly she will not hear a sound. And
+who will know where you are gone, if the cage door is left open?
+And you will fight for me at Post Fort 0' God. MON DIEU! how you
+will fight! I swear it will do the ghost of Jacques Le Beau good
+to see what happens there."
+
+He went away, to where he had left his light sledge and two dogs
+in the edge of the timber, and waited for the moon to rise.
+
+Still Miki did not move, A light had appeared in the window of the
+cabin, and his eyes were fixed on it yearningly as the low whine
+gathered in his throat again. His world no longer lay beyond that
+window. The Woman and the baby had obliterated in him all desire
+but to be with them.
+
+In the cabin Nanette was thinking of him--and of Durant. The man's
+words came to her again, vividly, significantly: "YOU WILL NOT
+WANT THE DOG." Yes, all the forest people would say that same
+thing--even LE FACTEUR himself, when he heard. SHE WOULD NOT WANT
+THE DOG! And why not? Because he had killed Jacques Le Beau, her
+husband, in defence of her? Because he had freed her from the
+bondage of The Brute? Because God had sent him to the end of his
+chain in that terrible moment that the baby Nanette might live, as
+the OTHER had not, and that she might grow up with laughter on her
+lips instead of sobs? In her there rose suddenly a thought that
+fanned the new flame in her heart. It MUST have been LE BON DIEU!
+Others might doubt, but she--never. She recalled all that Le Beau
+had told her about the wild dog--how for many days he had robbed
+the traps, and the terrific fight he had made when at last he was
+caught. And of all that The Brute had said there stood out most
+the words he had spoken one day.
+
+"He is a devil, but he was not born of wolf. NON, some time, a
+long time ago, he was a white man's dog."
+
+A WHITE MAN'S DOG!
+
+Her soul thrilled. Once--a long time ago--he had known a master
+with a white heart, just as she had known a girlhood in which the
+flowers bloomed and the birds sang. She tried to look back, but
+she could not see very far. She could not vision that day, less
+than a year ago, when Miki, an angular pup, came down out of the
+Farther North with Challoner; she could not vision the strange
+comradeship between the pup and Neewa, the little black bear cub,
+nor that tragic day when they had fallen out of Challoner's canoe
+into the swift stream that had carried them over the waterfall and
+into the Great Adventure which had turned Neewa into a grown bear
+and Miki into a wild dog. But in her heart she FELT the things
+which she could not see. Miki had not come by chance. Something
+greater than that had sent him.
+
+She rose quietly, so that she would not waken the baby in the
+crib, and opened the door. The moon was just rising over the
+forest and through the glow of it she went to the cage. She heard
+the dog's joyous whine, and then she felt the warm caress of his
+tongue upon her bare hands as she thrust them between the sapling
+bars.
+
+"NON, NON; you are not a devil," she cried softly, her voice
+filled with a strange tremble. "O-o-ee, my SOKETAAO, I prayed,
+PRAYED--and you came. Yes, on my knees each night I prayed to Our
+Blessed Lady that she might have mercy on my baby, and make the
+sun in heaven shine for her through all time. AND YOU CAME! And
+the dear God does not send devils in answer to prayer. NON;
+never!"
+
+And Miki, as though some spirit had given him the power to
+understand, rested the weight of his bruised and beaten head on
+her hands.
+
+From the edge of the forest Durant was watching. He had caught the
+flash of light from the door and had seen Nanette go to the cage,
+and his eyes did not leave her until she returned into the cabin.
+He laughed as he went to his fire and finished making the WAHGUN
+he was fastening to the end of a long pole. This WAHGUN and the
+pole added to his own cleverness were saving him twelve good fox
+skins, and he continued to chuckle there in the fireglow as he
+thought how easy it was to beat a woman's wits. Nanette was a fool
+to refuse the pelts, and Jacques was--dead. It was a most lucky
+combination of circumstances for him. Fortune had surely come his
+way. On LE BETE, as he called the wild dog, he would gamble all
+that he possessed in the big fight. And he would win.
+
+He waited until the light in the cabin went out before he
+approached the cage again. Miki heard him coming. At a
+considerable distance he saw him, for the moon was already turning
+the night into day. Durant knew the ways of dogs. With them he
+employed a superior reason where Le Beau had used the club and the
+rawhide. So he came up openly and boldly, and, as if by accident,
+dropped the end of the pole between the bars. With his hands
+against the cage, apparently unafraid, he began talking in a
+casual way. He was different from Le Beau. Miki watched him
+closely for a space and then let his eyes rest again on the
+darkened cabin window. Stealthily Durant began to take advantage
+of his opportunity. A little at a time he moved the end of the
+pole until it was over Miki's head, with the deadly bowstring and
+its open noose hanging down. He was an adept in the use of the
+WAHGUN. Many foxes and wolves, and even a bear, he had caught that
+way. Miki, numbed by the cold, scarcely felt the BABICHE noose as
+it settled softly about his neck. He did not see Durant brace
+himself, with his feet against the running-log of the cage.
+
+Then, suddenly, Durant lurched himself backward, and it seemed to
+Miki as though a giant trap of steel had closed about his neck.
+Instantly his wind was cut off. He could make no sound as he
+struggled frantically to free himself. Hand over hand Durant
+dragged him to the bars, and there, with his feet still braced, he
+choked with his whole weight until--when at last he let up on the
+WAHGUN--Miki collapsed as if dead. Ten seconds later Durant was
+looping a muzzle over his closed jaws. He left the cage door open
+when he went back to his sledge, carrying Miki in his arms.
+Nanette's slow wits would never guess, he told himself. She would
+think that LE BETE had escaped into the forest.
+
+It was not his scheme to club Miki into serfdom, as Le Beau had
+failed to do. Durant was wiser than that. In his crude and
+merciless way he had come to know certain phenomena of the animal
+mind. He was not a psychologist; oh the other hand brutality had
+not utterly blinded him. So, instead of lashing Miki to the sledge
+as Le Beau had fastened him to his improvised drag, Durant made
+his captive comfortable, covering him with a warm blanket before
+he began his journey eastward. He made sure, however, that there
+was no flaw in the muzzle about Miki's jaws, and that the free end
+of the chain to which he was still fastened was well hitched to
+the Gee-bar of his sledge.
+
+When these things were done Durant set off in the direction of
+Fort O' God, and if Jacques Le Beau could have seen him then he
+would have had good reason to guess at his elation. By taint of
+birth and blood Durant was a gambler first, and a trapper
+afterward. He set his traps that he might have the thrill of
+wagering his profits, and for half a dozen successive years he had
+won at the big annual dog fight at Post Fort O' God. But this year
+he had been half afraid. His fear had not been of Jacques Le Beau
+and Netah, but of the halfbreed away over on Red Belly Lake.
+Grouse Piet was the halfbreed's name, and the "dog" that he was
+going to put up at the fight was half wolf. Therefore, in the
+foolish eagerness of his desire, had Durant offered two cross
+foxes and ten reds--the price of five dogs and not one--for the
+possession of Le Beau's wild dog. And now that he had him for
+nothing, and Nanette was poorer by twelve skins, he was happy. For
+he had now a good match for Grouse Piet's half wolf, and he would
+chance his money and his credit at the Post to the limit.
+
+When Miki came back to his senses Durant stopped his dogs, for he
+had been watching closely for this moment. He bent over the sledge
+and began talking, not in Le Beau's brutal way, but in a careless
+chummy sort of voice, and with his mittened hand he patted his
+captive's head. This was a new thing to Miki, for he knew that it
+was not the hand of Nanette, but of a man-beast, and the softness
+of his nest in the blanket, over which Henri had thrown a bear
+skin, was also new. A short time ago he was frozen and stiff. Now
+he was warm and comfortable. So he did not move. And Durant
+exulted in his cleverness. He did not travel far in the night, but
+stopped four or five miles from Nanette's cabin, and built a fire.
+Over this he boiled coffee and roasted meat. He allowed the meat
+to roast slowly, turning it round and round on a wooden spit, so
+that the aroma of it grew thick and inviting in the air. He had
+fastened his two sledge dogs fifty paces away, but the sledge was
+close to the fire, and he watched the effect on Miki of the
+roasting meat. Since the days of his puppyhood with Challoner a
+smell like that which came from the meat had not filled Miki's
+nostrils, and at last Durant saw him lick his chops and heard the
+click of his teeth. He chuckled in his beard. Still he waited
+another quarter of an hour. Then he pulled the meat off the spit,
+cut it up, and gave a half of it to Miki. And Miki ate it
+ravenously.
+
+A clever man was Henri Durant!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINETEEN
+
+
+During the last few days in December all trails for ten thousand
+square miles around led to Post Fort 0' God. It was the eve of
+OOSKE PIPOON--of the New Year--the mid-winter carnival time of the
+people of the wilderness, when from teepees and cabins far and
+near come the trappers and their families to sell their furs and
+celebrate for a few days with others of their kind. To this New
+Year gathering men, women, and children look forward through long
+and weary months. The trapper's wife has no neighbour. Her
+husband's "line" is a little kingdom inviolate, with no other
+human life within many miles of it; so for the women the OOSKE
+PIPOON is a time of rejoicing; for the children it is the "big
+circus," and for the men a reward for the labour and hardship of
+catching their fur. During these few days old acquaintanceships
+are renewed and new ones are made. It is here that the "news" of
+the trackless wilderness is spread, the news of deaths, of
+marriages, and of births; of tragic happenings that bring horror
+and grief and tears, and of others that bring laughter and joy.
+For the first and last time in all the seven months' winter the
+people of the forests "come to town." Indian, halfbreed, "blood,"
+and white man, join in the holiday without distinction of colour
+or creed.
+
+This year there was to be a great caribou roast, a huge barbecue,
+at Fort O' God, and by the time Henri Durant came within half a
+dozen miles of the Post the trails from north and south and east
+and west were beaten hard by the tracks of dogs and men. That year
+a hundred sledges came in from the forests, and with them were
+three hundred men and women and children and half a thousand dogs.
+
+Durant was a day later than he had planned to be, but he had made
+good use of his time. For Miki, while still muzzled, now followed
+at the end of the babiche that was tied to Henri's sledge. In the
+afternoon of the third day after leaving Nanette Le Beau's cabin
+Durant turned off the main-travelled trail until he came to the
+shack of Andre Ribon, who kept the Factor and his people at the
+Post supplied with fresh meat. Andre, who was becoming over-
+anxious at Durant's delay, was still waiting when his friend came.
+It was here that Henri's Indian had left his fighting dog, the big
+husky. And here he left Miki, locked in Andre's shack. Then the
+two men went on to the Post which was only a mile away.
+
+Neither he nor Ribon returned that night. The cabin was empty. And
+with the beginning of dusk Miki began to hear weird and strange
+sounds which grew louder as darkness settled deeper. It was the
+sound of the carnival at the Post--the distant tumult of human
+voice mingled with the howling of a hundred dogs. He had never
+heard anything like it before, and for a long time he listened
+without moving. Then he stood up like a man before the window with
+this fore-paws resting against the heavy sash. Ribon's cabin was
+at the crest of a knoll that over-looked the frozen lake, and far
+off, over the tops of the scrub timber that fringed the edge of
+it, Miki saw the red glow in the sky made by a score of great camp
+fires. He whined, and dropped on his four feet again. It was a
+long wait between that and another day. But the cabin was more
+comfortable than Le Beau's prison-cage had been. All through the
+night his restless slumber was filled with visions of Nanette and
+the baby.
+
+Durant and Ribon did not return until nearly noon the next day.
+They brought with them fresh meat, of which Miki ate ravenously,
+for he was hungry. In an unresponsive way he tolerated the
+advances of these two. A second night he was left alone in the
+cabin. When Durant and Ribon came back again in the early dawn
+they brought with them a cage four feet square made of small birch
+saplings. The open door of this cage they drew close to the door
+of the cabin, and by means of a chunk of fresh meat Miki was
+induced to enter through it. Instantly the trap fell, and he was a
+prisoner. The cage was already fastened on a wide toboggan, and
+scarcely was the sun up when Miki was on his way to Fort O' God.
+
+This was the big day at the carnival--the day of the caribou-roast
+and the fight. For many minutes before they came in sight of Fort
+O' God Miki heard the growing sound. It amazed him, and he stood
+up on his feet in his cage, rigid and alert, utterly unconscious
+of the men who were pulling him. He was looking ahead of them, and
+Durant chuckled exultantly as they heard him growl, and his teeth
+click.
+
+"Oui, he will fight! He would fight NOW," he chuckled.
+
+They were following the shore of a lake. Suddenly they came around
+the end of a point, and all of Fort O' God lay on the rising shelf
+of the shore ahead of them. The growl died in Miki's throat. His
+teeth shut with a last click. For an instant his heart seemed to
+grow dead and still. Until this moment his world had held only
+half a dozen human beings. Now, so suddenly that he had no flash
+of warning, he saw a hundred of them, two hundred, three hundred.
+At sight of Durant and the cage a swarm of them began running down
+to the shore. And everywhere there were wolves, so many of them
+that his senses grew dazed as he stared. His cage was the centre
+of a clamouring, gesticulating horde of men and boys as it was
+dragged up the slope. Women began joining the crowd, many of them
+with small children in their arms. Then his journey came to an
+end. He was close to another cage, and in that cage was a beast
+like himself. Beside this cage there stood a tall, swarthy,
+shaggy-headed halfbreed who looked like a pirate. The man was
+Grouse Piet, Durant's rival.
+
+A contemptuous leer was on his thick-lipped face as he looked at
+Miki. He turned, and to the group of dark-faced Indians and breeds
+about him he said something that roused a guttural laugh.
+
+Durant's face flamed red.
+
+"Laugh, you heathen," he challenged, "but don't forget that Henri
+Durant is here to take your bets!" Then he shook the two cross and
+ten red foxes in the face of Grouse Piet.
+
+"Cover them, Grouse Piet," he cried. "And I have ten times more
+where they came from!"
+
+With his muzzle lifted, Miki was sniffing the air. It was filled
+with strange scents, heavy with the odours of men, of dogs, and of
+the five huge caribou roasting on their spits fifteen feet over
+the big fires that were built under them. For ten hours those
+caribou would roast, turning slowly on spits as thick as a man's
+leg. The fight was to come before the feast.
+
+For an hour the clatter and tumult of voices hovered about the two
+cages. Men appraised the fighters and made their bets, and Grouse
+Piet and Henri Durant made their throats hoarse flinging banter
+and contempt at each other. At the end of the hour the crowd began
+to thin out. In the place of men and women half a hundred dark-
+visaged little children crowded about the cages. It was not until
+then that Miki caught glimpses of the hordes of beasts fastened in
+ones and twos and groups in the edge of the clearing. His nostrils
+had at last caught the distinction. They were not wolves. They
+were like himself.
+
+It was a long time before his eyes rested steadily on the wolf-dog
+in the other cage. He went to the edge of his bars and sniffed.
+The wolf-dog thrust his gaunt muzzle toward him. He made Miki
+think of the huge wolf he had fought one day on the edge of the
+cliff, and instinctively he showed his fangs, and snarled. The
+wolf-dog snarled back. Henri Durant rubbed his hands exultantly,
+and Grouse Piet laughed softly.
+
+"Oui; they will FIGHT!" said Henri again.
+
+"Ze wolf, he will fight, oui," said Grouse Piet. "But your dog,
+m'sieu, he be vair seek, lak a puppy, w'en ze fight come!"
+
+A little later Miki saw a white man standing close to his cage. It
+was MacDonnell, the Scotch factor. He gazed at Miki and the wolf-
+dog with troubled eyes. Ten minutes later, in the little room
+which he had made his office, he was saying to a younger man:
+
+"I'd like to stop it, but I can't. They wouldn't stand for it. It
+would lose us half a season's catch of fur. There's been a fight
+like this at Fort O' God for the last fifty years, and I don't
+suppose, after all, that it's any worse than one of the prize
+fights down there. Only, in this case--"
+
+"They kill," said the younger man.
+
+"Yes, that's it. Usually one of the dogs dies."
+
+The younger man knocked the ash out of his pipe.
+
+"I love dogs," he said, simply. "There'll never be a fight at my
+post, Mac--unless it's between men. And I'm not going to see this
+fight, because I'm afraid I'd kill some one if I did."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY
+
+
+It was two o'clock in the afternoon. The caribou were roasting
+brown. In two more hours the feast would begin. The hour of the
+fight was at hand.
+
+In the centre of the clearing three hundred men, women, and
+children were gathered in a close circle about a sapling cage ten
+feet square. Close to this cage, one at each side, were drawn the
+two smaller cages. Beside one of these cages stood Henri Durant;
+beside the other, Grouse Piet. They were not bantering now. Their
+faces were hard and set. And three hundred pairs of eyes were
+staring at them, and three hundred pairs of ears waiting for the
+thrilling signal.
+
+It came--from Grouse Piet.
+
+With a swift movement Durant pulled up the door of Miki's cage.
+Then, suddenly, he prodded him from behind with a crotched stick,
+and with a single leap Miki was in the big cage. Almost at the
+same instant the wolf-dog leapt from Grouse Piet's cage, and the
+two faced each other in the arena.
+
+With the next breath he drew Durant could have groaned. What
+happened in the following half minute was a matter of environment
+with Miki. In the forest the wolf-dog would have interested him to
+the exclusion of everything else, and he would have looked upon
+him as another Netah or a wild wolf. But in his present
+surroundings the idea of fighting was the last to possess him. He
+was fascinated by that grim and waiting circle of faces closing in
+the big cage; he scrutinized it, turning his head sharply from
+point to point, as if hoping to see Nanette and the baby, or even
+Challoner his first master. To the wolf-dog Grouse Piet had given
+the name of Taao, because of the extraordinary length of his
+fangs; and of Taao, to Durant's growing horror, Miki was utterly
+oblivious after that first head-on glance. He trotted to the edge
+of the cage and thrust his nose between the bars, and a taunting
+laugh rose out of Grouse Piet's throat. Then he began making a
+circle of the cage, his sharp eyes on the silent ring of faces.
+Taao stood in the centre of the cage, and not once did his reddish
+eyes leave Miki. What was outside of the cage held small interest
+for him. He understood his business, and murder was bred in his
+heart. For a space during which Durant's heart beat like a hammer
+Taao turned, as if on a pivot, following Miki's movement, and the
+crest on his spine stood up like bristles.
+
+Then Miki stopped, and in that moment Durant saw the end of all
+his hopes. Without a sound the wolf-dog was at his opponent. A
+bellow rose from Grouse Piet's lips. A deep breath passed through
+the circle of spectators, and Durant felt a cold chill run up his
+back to the roots of his hair. What happened in the next instant
+made men's hearts stand still. In that first rush Miki should have
+died. Grouse Piet expected him to die, and Durant expected him to
+die. But in the last fractional bit of the second in which the
+wolf-dog's jaws closed, Miki was transformed into a thing of
+living lightning. No man had ever seen a movement swifter than
+that with which he turned on Taao. Their jaws clashed. There was a
+sickening grinding of bone, and in another moment they were
+rolling and twisting together on the earth floor. Neither Grouse
+Piet nor Durant could see what was happening. They forgot even
+their own bets in the horror of that fight. Never had there been
+such a fight at Fort O' God.
+
+The sound of it reached to the Company's store. In the door,
+looking toward the big cage, stood the young white man. He heard
+the snarling, the clashing of teeth, and his jaws set heavily and
+a dull flame burned in his eyes. His breath came in a sudden gasp.
+
+"DAMN!" he cried, softly.
+
+His hands clenched, and he stepped slowly down from the door and
+went toward the cage. It was over when he made his way through the
+ring of spectators. The fight had ended as suddenly as it had
+begun, and Grouse Piet's wolf-dog lay in the centre of the cage
+with a severed jugular. Miki looked as though he might be dying.
+Durant had opened the door and had slipped a rope over his head,
+and outside the cage Miki stood swaying on his feet, red with
+blood, and half blind. His flesh was red and bleeding in a dozen
+places, and a stream of blood trickled from his mouth. A cry of
+horror rose to the young white man's lips as he looked down at
+him.
+
+And then, almost in the same breath, there came a still stranger
+cry.
+
+"Good God! Miki--Miki--Miki--"
+
+Beating upon his brain as if from a vast distance, coming to him
+through the blindness of his wounds, Miki heard that voice.
+
+The VOICE! THE voice that had lived with him in all his dreams,
+the voice he had waited for, and searched for, and knew that some
+day he would find. The voice of Challoner, his master!
+
+He dropped on his belly, whining, trying to see through the film
+of blood in his eyes; and lying there, wounded almost unto death,
+his tail thumped the ground in recognition. And then, to the
+amazement of all who beheld, Challoner was down upon his knees
+beside him, and his arms were about him, and Miki's lacerated
+tongue was reaching for his hands, his face, his clothes.
+
+"Miki--Miki--Miki!"
+
+Durant's hand fell heavily upon Challoner's shoulder.
+
+It was like the touch of a red-hot iron to Challoner. In a flash
+he was on his feet, facing him.
+
+"He's mine," Challoner cried, trying to hold back his passion.
+"He's mine you--you devil!"
+
+And then, powerless to hold back his desire for vengeance, his
+clenched fist swung like a rock to Durant's heavy jaw, and the
+Frenchman went to the ground. For a moment Challoner stood over
+him, but he did not move. Fiercely he turned upon Grouse Piet and
+the crowd. Miki was cringing at his feet again. Pointing to him,
+Challoner cried loudly, so all could hear.
+
+"He's my dog. Where this beast got him I don't know. But he's
+mine. Look for yourselves! See--see him lick my hand. Would he do
+that for HIM? And look at that ear. There's no other ear in all
+the north cut like that. I lost him almost a year ago, but I'd
+know him among ten thousand by that ear. By God!--if I had known--
+-"
+
+He elbowed his way through the breeds and Indians, leading Miki by
+the rope Durant had slipped over the dog's head. He went to
+MacDonnell, and told him what had happened. He told of the
+preceding spring, and of the accident in which Miki and the bear
+cub were lost from his canoe and swept over the waterfall. After
+registering his claim against whatever Durant might have to say he
+went to the shack in which he was staying at Fort 0' God.
+
+An hour later Challoner sat with Miki's big head between his two
+hands, and talked to him. He had bathed and dressed his wounds,
+and Miki could see. His eyes were on his master's face, and his
+hard tail thumped the floor. Both were oblivious of the sounds of
+the revellers outside; the cries of men, the shouting of boys, the
+laughter of women, and the incessant barking of dogs. In
+Challoner's eyes there was a soft glow.
+
+"Miki, old boy, you haven't forgotten a thing--not a dam' thing,
+have you? You were nothing but an onery-legged pup then, but you
+didn't forget! Remember what I told you, that I was going to take
+you and the cub down to the Girl? Do you remember? The Girl I said
+was an angel, and 'd love you to death, and all that? Well, I'm
+glad something happened--and you didn't go. It wasn't the same
+when I got back, an' SHE wasn't the same, Miki. Lord, she'd got
+married, AND HAD TWO KIDS! Think of that, old scout--TWO! How the
+deuce could she have taken care of you and the cub, eh? And
+nothing else was the same, Boy. Three years in God's Country--up
+here where you burst your lungs just for the fun of drinking in
+air--changed me a lot, I guess. Inside a week I wanted to come
+back, Miki. Yessir, I was SICK to come back. So I came. And we're
+going to stick now, Miki. You're going with me up to that new Post
+the Company has given me. From now on we're pals. Understand, old
+scout, we're PALS!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
+
+
+It was late the night of the big feast at Post Fort O' God that
+MacDonnell, the factor, sent for Challoner. Challoner was
+preparing for bed when an Indian boy pounded on the door of his
+shack and a moment later gave him the message. He looked at his
+watch. It was eleven o'clock. What could the Factor want of him at
+that hour, he wondered? Flat on his belly near the warm box stove
+Miki watched his new-found master speculatively as he pulled on
+his boots. His eyes were wide open now. Challoner had washed from
+him the blood of the terrific fight of that afternoon.
+
+"Something to do with that devil of a Durant," growled Challoner,
+looking at the battle-scarred dog. "Well, if he hopes to get YOU
+again, Miki, he's barking up the wrong tree. You're MINE!"
+
+Miki thumped his hard tail on the floor and wriggled toward his
+master in mute adoration. Together they went out into the night.
+
+It was a night of white moonlight and a multitude of stars. The
+four great fires over which the caribou had roasted for the savage
+barbecue that day were still burning brightly. In the edge of the
+forest that ringed in the Post were the smouldering embers of a
+score of smaller fires. Back of these fires were faintly outlined
+the gray shadows of teepees and tents. In these shelters the three
+hundred halfbreeds and Indians who had come in from the forest
+trails to the New Year carnival at the Post were sleeping. Only
+here and there was there a movement of life. Even the dogs were
+quiet after the earlier hours of excitement and gluttony.
+
+Past the big fires, with their huge spits still standing,
+Challoner passed toward the Factor's quarters. Miki sniffed at the
+freshly picked bones. Beyond these bones there was no sign of the
+two thousand pounds of flesh that had roasted that day on the
+spits. Men, women, children, and dogs had stuffed themselves until
+there was nothing left. It was the silence of Mutai--the "belly
+god"--the god who eats himself to sleep each night--that hovered
+strangely over this Post of Fort O' God, three hundred miles from
+civilization.
+
+There was a light in the Factor's room, and Challoner entered with
+Miki at his heels. MacDonnell, the Scotchman, was puffing moodily
+on his pipe. There was a worried look in his ruddy face as the
+younger man seated himself, and his eyes were on Miki.
+
+"Durant has been here," he said. "He's ugly. I'm afraid of
+trouble. If you hadn't struck him--"
+
+Challoner shrugged his shoulders as he filled his own pipe from
+the Factor's tobacco.
+
+"You see--you don't just understand the situation at Fort 0' God,"
+went on MacDonnell. "There's been a big dog fight here at New Year
+for the last fifty years. It's become a part of history, a part of
+Fort O' God itself, and that's why in my own fifteen years here I
+haven't tried to stop it. I believe it would bring on a sort of--
+revolution. I'd wager a half of my people would go to another post
+with their furs. That's why all the sympathy seems to be with
+Durant. Even Grouse Piet, his rival, tells him he's a fool to let
+you get away with him that way. Durant says that dog is HIS."
+
+MacDonnell nodded at Miki, lying at Challoner's feet.
+
+"Then he lies," said Challoner quietly.
+
+"He says he bought him of Jacques Le Beau."
+
+"Then Le Beau sold a dog that didn't belong to him."
+
+For a moment MacDonnell was silent. Then he said:
+
+"But that wasn't what I had you come over for, Challoner. Durant
+told me something that froze my blood to-night. Your outfit starts
+for your post up in the Reindeer Lake county to-morrow, doesn't
+it?"
+
+"In the morning."
+
+"Then could you, with one of my Indians and a team, arrange to
+swing around by way of the Jackson's Knee? You'd lose a week, but
+you could overtake your outfit before it reached the Reindeer--and
+it would be a mighty big favour to me. There's a--a HELL of a
+thing happened over there."
+
+Again he looked at Miki.
+
+"GAWD!" he breathed.
+
+Challoner waited. He thought he saw a shudder pass through the
+Factor's shoulders.
+
+"I'd go myself--I ought to, but this frosted lung of mine has made
+me sit tight this winter, Challoner. I OUGHT to go. Why--(a sudden
+glow shot into his eyes)--I knew this Nanette Le Beau when she was
+SO HIGH, fifteen years ago. I watched her grow up, Challoner. If I
+hadn't been married--then--I'd have fallen in love with her. Do
+you know her, Challoner? Did you ever see Nanette Le Beau?"
+
+Challoner shook his head.
+
+"An angel--if God ever made one," declared MacDonnell through his
+red beard. "She lived over beyond the Jackson's Knee with her
+father. And he died, froze to death crossing Red Eye Lake one
+night. I've always thought Jacques Le Beau MADE her marry him
+after that. Or else she didn't know, or was crazed, or frightened
+at being alone. Anyway, she married him. It was five years ago I
+saw her last. Now and then I've heard things, but I didn't
+believe--not all of them. I didn't believe that Le Beau beat her,
+and knocked her down when he wanted to. I didn't believe he
+dragged her through the snow by her hair one day until she was
+nearly dead. They were just rumours, and he was seventy miles
+away. But I believe them now. Durant came from their place, and I
+guess he told me a whole lot of the truth--to save that dog."
+
+Again he looked at Miki.
+
+"You see, Durant tells me that Le Beau caught the dog in one of
+his traps, took him to his cabin, and tortured him into shape for
+the big fight. When Durant came he was so taken with the dog that
+he bought him, and it was while Le Beau was driving the dog mad in
+his cage to show his temper that Nanette interfered. Le Beau
+knocked her down, and then jumped on her and was pulling her hair
+and choking her when the dog went for him and killed him. That's
+the story. Durant told me the truth through fear that I'd have the
+dog shot if he was an out-and-out murderer. And that's why I want
+you to go by way of the Jackson's Knee. I want you to investigate,
+and I want you to do what you can for Nanette Le Beau. My Indian
+will bring her back to Port O' God."
+
+With Scotch stoicism MacDonnell had repressed whatever excitement
+he may have felt. He spoke quietly. But the curious shudder went
+through his shoulders again. Challoner stared at him in blank
+amazement.
+
+"You mean to say that Miki--this dog--has killed a man?"
+
+"Yes. He killed him, Durant says, just as he killed Grouse Piet's
+wolf-dog in the big fight to-day. UGH!" As Challoner's eyes fell
+slowly upon Miki, the Factor added: "But Grouse Piet's dog was
+better than the man. If what I hear about Le Beau was true he's
+better dead than alive. Challoner, if you didn't think it too much
+trouble, and could go that way--and see Nanette--"
+
+"I'll go," said Challoner, dropping a hand to Miki's head.
+
+For half an hour after that MacDonnell told him the things he knew
+about Nanette Le Beau. When Challoner rose to go the Factor
+followed him to the door.
+
+"Keep your eyes open for Durant," he warned. "That dog is worth
+more to him than all his winnings to-day, and they say his stakes
+were big. He won heavily from Grouse Piet, but the halfbreed is
+thick with him now. I know it. So watch out."
+
+Out in the open space, in the light of the moon and stars,
+Challoner stood far a moment with Miki's forepaws resting against
+his breast. The dog's head was almost on a level with his
+shoulders.
+
+"D'ye remember when you fell out of the canoe, Boy?" he asked
+softly. "Remember how you 'n' the cub were tied in the bow, an'
+you got to scrapping and fell overboard just above the rapids?
+Remember? By Jove! those rapids pretty near got ME, too. I thought
+you were dead, sure--both of you. I wonder what happened to the
+cub?"
+
+Miki whined in response, and his whole body trembled.
+
+"And since then you've killed a man," added Challoner, as if he
+still could not quite believe. "And I'm to take you back to the
+woman. That's the funny thing about it. You're going back to HER,
+and if she says kill you--"
+
+He dropped Miki's forefeet and went on to the cabin. At the
+threshold a low growl rose in Miki's throat. Challoner laughed,
+and opened the door. They went in, and the dog's growl was a
+menacing snarl. Challoner had left his lamp burning low, and in
+the light of it he saw Henri Durant and Grouse Piet waiting for
+him. He turned up the wick, and nodded.
+
+"Good evening. Pretty late for a call, isn't it?"
+
+Grouse Piet's stolid face did not change its expression. It struck
+Challoner, as he glanced at him, that in head and shoulders he
+bore a grotesque resemblance to a walrus. Durant's eyes were dully
+ablaze. His face was swollen where Challoner had struck him. Miki,
+stiffened to the hardness of a knot, and still snarling under his
+breath, had crawled under Challoner's bunk. Durant pointed to him.
+
+"We've come after that dog," he said.
+
+"You can't have him, Durant," replied Challoner, trying hard to
+make himself appear at ease in a situation that sent a chill up
+his back. As he spoke he was making up his mind why Grouse Piet
+had come with Durant. They were giants, both of them: more than
+that--monsters. Instinctively he had faced them with the small
+table between them. "I'm sorry I lost my temper out there," he
+continued. "I shouldn't have struck you, Durant. It wasn't your
+fault--and I apologize. But the dog is mine. I lost him over in
+the Jackson's Knee country, and if Jacques Le Beau caught him in a
+trap, and sold him to you, he sold a dog that didn't belong to
+him. I'm willing to pay you back what you gave for him, just to be
+fair. How much was it?"
+
+Grouse Piet had risen to his feet. Durant came to the opposite
+edge of the table, and leaned over it. Challoner wondered how a
+single blow had knocked him down.
+
+"Non, he is not for sale." Durant's voice was low; so low that it
+seemed to choke him to get it out. It was filled with a repressed
+hatred. Challoner saw the great cords of his knotted hands bulging
+under the skin as he gripped the edge of the table. "M'sieu, we
+have come for that dog. Will you let us take him?"
+
+"I will pay you back what you gave for him, Durant. I will add to
+the price."
+
+"Non. He is mine. Will you give him back--NOW?"
+
+"No!"
+
+Scarcely was the word out of his mouth when Durant flung his whole
+weight and strength against the table. Challoner had not expected
+the move--just yet. With a bellow of rage and hatred Durant was
+upon him, and under the weight of the giant he crashed to the
+floor. With them went the table and lamp. There was a vivid
+splutter of flame and the cabin was in darkness, except where the
+moon-light flooded through the one window. Challoner had looked
+for something different. He had expected Durant to threaten before
+he acted, and, sizing up the two of them, he had decided to reach
+the edge of his bunk during the discussion. Under the pillow was
+his revolver. It was too late now. Durant was on him, fumbling in
+the darkness for his throat, and as he flung one arm upward to get
+a hook around the Frenchman's neck he heard Grouse Piet throw the
+table back. The next instant they were rolling in the moonlight on
+the floor, and Challoner caught a glimpse of Grouse Piet's huge
+bulk bending over them. Durant's head was twisted under his arm,
+but one of the giant's hands had reached his throat. The halfbreed
+saw this, and he cried out something in a guttural voice. With a
+tremendous effort Challoner rolled himself and his adversary out
+of the patch of light into darkness again. Durant's thick neck
+cracked. Again Grouse Piet called out in that guttural,
+questioning voice. Challoner put every ounce of his energy into
+the crook of his arm, and Durant did not answer.
+
+Then the weight of Grouse Piet fell upon them, and his great hands
+groped for Challoner's neck. His thick fingers found Durant's
+beard first, then fumbled for Challoner, and got their hold. Ten
+seconds of their terrific grip would have broken his neck. But the
+fingers never closed. A savage cry of agony burst from Grouse
+Piet's lips, and with that cry, ending almost in a scream, came
+the snap of great jaws and the rending snarl of fangs in the
+darkness. Durant heard, and with a great heave of his massive body
+he broke free from Challoner's grip, and leapt to his feet. In a
+flash Challoner was at his bunk, facing his enemies with the
+revolver in his hand.
+
+Everything had happened quickly. Scarcely more than a minute had
+passed since the overturning of the table, and now, in the moment
+when the situation had turned in his favour, a sudden swift and
+sickening horror seized upon Challoner. Bloody and terrible there
+rose before him the one scene he had witnessed that day in the big
+cage where Miki and the wolf-dog had fought. And there--in that
+darkness of the cabin--
+
+He heard a moaning cry and the crash of a body to the floor.
+
+"Miki, Miki," he cried. "Here! Here!"
+
+He dropped his revolver and sprang to the door, flinging it wide
+open.
+
+"For God's sake get out!" he cried. "GET OUT!"
+
+A bulk dashed past him into the night. He knew it was Durant. Then
+he leapt to the dark shadows on the floor and dug his two hands
+into the loose hide at the back of Miki's neck, dragging him back,
+and shouting his name. He saw Grouse Piet crawling toward the
+door. He saw him rise to his feet, silhouetted for a moment
+against the starlight, and stagger out into the night. And then he
+felt Miki's weight slinking down to the floor, and under his hands
+the dog's muscles grew limp and saggy. For two or three minutes he
+continued to kneel beside him before he closed the cabin door and
+lighted another lamp. He set up the overturned table and placed
+the lamp on it. Miki had not moved. He lay flat on his belly, his
+head between his forepaws, looking up at Challoner with a mute
+appeal in his eyes.
+
+Challoner reached out his two arms.
+
+"Miki!"
+
+In an instant Miki was up against him, his forefeet against his
+breast, and with his arms about the dog's shoulders Challoner's
+eyes took in the floor. On it were wet splashes and bits of torn
+clothing.
+
+His arms closed more tightly.
+
+"Miki, old boy, I'm much obliged," he said.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
+
+
+The next morning Challoner's outfit of three teams and four men
+left north and west for the Reindeer Lake country on the journey
+to his new post at the mouth of the Cochrane. An hour later
+Challoner struck due west with a light sledge and a five-dog team
+for the Jackson's Knee. Behind him followed one of MacDonnell's
+Indians with the team that was to bring Nanette to Fort O' God.
+
+He saw nothing more of Durant and Grouse Piet, and accepted
+MacDonnell's explanation that they had undoubtedly left the Post
+shortly after their assault upon him in the cabin. No doubt their
+disappearance had been hastened by the fact that a patrol of the
+Royal Northwest Mounted Police on its way to York Factory was
+expected at Fort O' God that day.
+
+Not until the final moment of departure was Miki brought from the
+cabin and tied to the gee-bar of Challoner's sledge. When he saw
+the five dogs squatted on their haunches he grew rigid and the old
+snarl rose in his throat. Under Challoner's quieting words he
+quickly came to understand that these beasts were not enemies, and
+from a rather suspicious toleration of them he very soon began to
+take a new sort of interest in them. It was a friendly team, bred
+in the south and without the wolf strain.
+
+Events had come to pass so swiftly and so vividly in Miki's life
+during the past twenty-four hours that for many miles after they
+left Fort O' God his senses were in an unsettled state of
+anticipation. His brain was filled with a jumble of strange and
+thrilling pictures. Very far away, and almost indistinct, were the
+pictures of things that had happened before he was made a prisoner
+by Jacques Le Beau. Even the memory of Neewa was fading under the
+thrill of events at Nanette's cabin and at Fort O' God. The
+pictures that blazed their way across his brain now were of men,
+and dogs, and many other things that he had never seen before. His
+world had suddenly transformed itself into a host of Henri Durants
+and Grouse Piets and Jacques Le Beaus, two-legged beasts who had
+clubbed him, and half killed him, and who had made him fight to
+keep the life in his body. He had tasted their blood in his
+vengeance. And he watched for them now. The pictures told him they
+were everywhere. He could imagine them as countless as the wolves,
+and as he had seen them crowded round the big cage in which he had
+slain the wolf-dog.
+
+In all of this excited and distorted world there was only one
+Challoner, and one Nanette, and one baby. All else was a chaos of
+uncertainty and of dark menace. Twice when the Indian came up
+close behind them Miki whirled about with a savage snarl.
+Challoner watched him, and understood.
+
+Of the pictures in his brain one stood out above all others,
+definite and unclouded, and that was the picture of Nanette. Yes,
+even above Challoner himself. There lived in him the consciousness
+of her gentle hands; her sweet, soft voice; the perfume of her
+hair and clothes and body--the WOMAN of her; and a part of the
+woman--as the hand is a part of the body--was the baby. It was
+this part of Miki that Challoner could not understand, and which
+puzzled him when they made camp that night. He sat for a long time
+beside the fire trying to bring back the old comradeship of the
+days of Miki's puppyhood. But he only partly succeeded. Miki was
+restive. Every nerve in his body seemed on edge. Again and again
+he faced the west, and always when he sniffed the air in that
+direction there came a low whine in his throat.
+
+That night, with doubt in his heart, Challoner fastened him near
+the tent with a tough rope of babiche.
+
+For a long time after Challoner had gone to bed Miki sat on his
+haunches close to the spruce to which he was fastened. It must
+have been ten o'clock, and the night was so still that the snap of
+a dying ember in the fire was like the crack of a whip to his
+ears. Miki's eyes were wide open and alert. Near the slowly
+burning logs, wrapped in his thick blankets, he could make out the
+motionless form of the Indian, asleep. Back of him the sledge-dogs
+had wallowed their beds in the snow and were silent. The moon was
+almost straight overhead, and a mile or two away a wolf pointed
+his muzzle to the radiant glow of it and howled. The sound, like a
+distant calling voice, added new fire to the growing thrill in
+Miki's blood. He turned in the direction of the wailing voice. He
+wanted to call back. He wanted to throw up his head and cry out to
+the forests, and the moon, and the starlit sky. But only his jaws
+clicked, and he looked at the tent in which Challoner was
+sleeping. He dropped down upon his belly in the snow. But his head
+was still alert and listening. The moon had already begun its
+westward decline. The fire burned out until the logs were only a
+dull and slumbering glow; the hand of Challoner's watch passed
+midnight, and still Miki was wide-eyed and restless in the thrill
+of the thing that was upon him. And then at last The Call that was
+coming to him from out of the night became his master, and he
+gnawed the babiche in two. It was the call of the Woman--of
+Nanette and the baby.
+
+In his freedom Miki sniffed at the edge of Challoner's tent. His
+back sagged. His tail drooped. He knew that in this hour he was
+betraying the master for whom he had waited so long, and who had
+lived so vividly in his dreams. It was not reasoning, but an
+instinctive oppression of fact. He would come back. That
+conviction burned dully in his brain. But now--to-night--he must
+go. He slunk off into the darkness. With the stealth of a fox he
+made his way between the sleeping dogs. Not until he was a quarter
+of a mile from the camp did he straighten out, and then a gray and
+fleeting shadow he sped westward under the light of the moon.
+
+There was no hesitation in the manner of his going. Free of the
+pain of his wounds, strong-limbed, deep-lunged as the strongest
+wolf of the forests, he went on tirelessly. Rabbits bobbing out of
+his path did not make him pause; even the strong scent of a
+fisher-cat almost under his nose did not swerve him a foot from
+his trail. Through swamp and deep forest, over lake and stream,
+across open barren and charred burns his unerring sense of
+orientation led him on. Once he stopped to drink where the swift
+current of a creek kept the water open. Even then he gulped in
+haste--and shot on. The moon drifted lower and lower until it sank
+into oblivion. The stars began to fade away The little ones went
+out, and the big ones grew sleepy and dull. A great snow-ghostly
+gloom settled over the forest world.
+
+In the six hours between midnight and dawn he covered thirty-five
+miles.
+
+And then he stopped. Dropping on his belly beside a rock at the
+crest of a ridge he watched the birth of day. With drooling jaws
+and panting breath he rested, until at last the dull gold of the
+winter sun began to paint the eastern sky. And then came the first
+bars of vivid sunlight, shooting over the eastern ramparts as guns
+flash from behind their battlements, and Miki rose to his feet and
+surveyed the morning wonder of his world. Behind him was Fort O'
+God, fifty miles away; ahead of him the cabin--twenty. It was the
+cabin he faced as he went down from the ridge.
+
+As the miles between him and the cabin grew fewer and fewer he
+felt again something of the oppression that had borne upon him at
+Challoner's tent. And yet it was different. He had run his race.
+He had answered The Call. And now, at the end, he was seized by a
+fear of what his welcome would be. For at the cabin he had killed
+a man--and the man had belonged to the woman. His progress became
+more hesitating. Mid-forenoon found him only half a mile from the
+home of Nanette and the baby. His keen nostrils caught the faint
+tang of smoke in the air. He did not follow it up, but circled
+like a wolf, coming up stealthily and uncertainly until at last he
+looked out into the little clearing where a new world had come
+into existence for him. He saw the sapling cage in which Jacques
+Le Beau had kept him a prisoner; the door of that cage was still
+open, as Durant had left it after stealing him; he saw the
+ploughed-up snow where he had leapt upon the man-brute--and he
+whined.
+
+He was facing the cabin door--and the door was wide open. He could
+see no life, but he could SMELL it. And smoke was rising from the
+chimney. He slunk across the open. In the manner of his going
+there was an abject humiliation--a plea for mercy if he had done
+wrong, a prayer to the creatures he worshipped that he might not
+be driven away.
+
+He came to the door, and peered in. The room was empty. Nanette
+was not there. Then his ears shot forward and his body grew
+suddenly tense, and he listened, listened, LISTENED to a soft,
+cooing sound that was coming from the crib. He swallowed hard; the
+faintest whine rose in his throat and his claws CLICKED, CLICKED,
+CLICKED, across the floor and he thrust his great head over the
+side of the little bed. The baby was there. With his warm tongue
+he kissed it--just once--and then, with another deep breath, lay
+down on the floor.
+
+He heard footsteps. Nanette came in with her arms filled with
+blankets; she carried these into the smaller room, and returned,
+before she saw him. For a moment she stared. Then, with a strange
+little cry, she ran to him; and once more he felt her arms about
+him; and he cried like a puppy with his muzzle against her breast,
+and Nanette laughed and sobbed, and in the crib the baby kicked
+and squealed and thrust her tiny moccasined feet up into the air.
+
+"Ao-oo tap-wa-mukun" ("When the devil goes heaven comes in,") say
+the Crees. And with the death of Le Beau, her husband, the devil
+had gone out of life for Nanette. She was more beautiful than
+ever. Heaven was in the dark, pure glow of her eyes. She was no
+longer like a dog under the club and the whip of a brute, and in
+the re-birth of her soul she was glorious. Youth had come back to
+her--freed from the yoke of oppression. She was happy. Happy with
+her baby, with freedom, with the sun and the stars shining for her
+again; and with new hope, the greatest star of all. Again on the
+night of that first day of his return Miki crept up to her when
+she was brushing her glorious hair. He loved to put his muzzle in
+it; he loved the sweet scent of it; he loved to put his head on
+her knees and feel it smothering him. And Nanette hugged him
+tight, even as she hugged the baby, for it was Miki who had
+brought her freedom, and hope, and life. What had passed was no
+longer a tragedy. It was justice. God had sent Miki to do for her
+what a father or a brother would have done.
+
+And the second night after that, when Challoner came early in the
+darkness, it happened that Nanette had her hair down in that same
+way; and Challoner, seeing her thus, with the lampglow shining in
+her eyes, felt that the world had taken a sudden swift turn under
+his feet--that through all his years he had been working forward
+to this hour.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
+
+
+With the coming of Challoner to the cabin of Nanette Le Beau there
+was no longer a shadow of gloom in the world for Miki. He did not
+reason out the wonder of it, nor did he have a foreboding for the
+future. It was the present in which he lived--the precious hours
+in which all the creatures he had ever loved were together. And
+yet, away back in his memory of those things that had grown deep
+in his soul, was the picture of Neewa, the bear; Neewa, his chum,
+his brother, his fighting comrade of many battles, and he thought
+of the cold and snow-smothered cavern at the top of the ridge in
+which Neewa had buried himself in that long and mysterious sleep
+that was so much like death. But it was in the present that he
+lived. The hours lengthened themselves out into days, and still
+Challoner did not go, nor did Nanette leave with the Indian for
+Fort O' God. The Indian returned with a note for MacDonnell in
+which Challoner told the Factor that something was the matter with
+the baby's lungs, and that she could not travel until the weather,
+which was intensely cold, grew warmer. He asked that the Indian be
+sent back with certain supplies.
+
+In spite of the terrific cold which followed the birth of the new
+year Challoner had put up his tent in the edge of the timber a
+hundred yards from the cabin, and Miki divided his time between
+the cabin and the tent. For him they were glorious days. And for
+Challoner--
+
+In a way Miki saw, though it was impossible for him to comprehend.
+As the days lengthened into a week, and the week into two, there
+was something in the glow of Nanette's eyes that had never been
+there before, and in the sweetness of her voice a new thrill, and
+in her prayers at night the thankfulness of a new and great joy.
+
+And then, one day, Miki looked up from where he was lying beside
+the baby's crib and he saw Nanette in his master's arms, her face
+turned up to him, her eyes filled with the glory of the stars, and
+Challoner was saying something which transformed her face into the
+face of an angel. Miki was puzzled. And he was more puzzled when
+Challoner came from Nanette to the crib, and snuggled the baby up
+in his arms; and the woman--looking at them both for a moment with
+that wonderful look in her eyes--suddenly covered her face with
+her hands and sobbed. Half a snarl rose in Miki's throat, but in
+that moment Challoner had put his arm around Nanette too, and
+Nanette's arms were about him and the baby, and she was sobbing
+something which for the life of him Miki could make neither head
+nor tail of. And yet he knew that he must not snarl or spring. He
+felt the wonder-thrill of the new thing that had come into the
+cabin; he gulped hard, and looked. A moment or two later Nanette
+was on her knees beside him, and her arms were around him, just as
+they had been around the man. And Challoner was dancing like a
+boy--cooing to the baby in his arms. Then he, too, dropped down
+beside Miki, and cried:
+
+"My Gawd! Miki--I'VE GOT A FAM'LY!"
+
+And Miki tried to understand.
+
+That night, after supper, he saw Challoner unbraid Nanette's
+glorious hair, and brush it. They laughed like two happy children.
+Miki tried still harder to understand.
+
+When Challoner went to go to his tent in the edge of the forest he
+took Nanette in his arms, and kissed her, and stroked her shining
+hair; and Nanette took his face between her hands and smiled and
+almost cried in her joy.
+
+After that Miki DID understand. He knew that happiness had come to
+all who were in that cabin.
+
+Now that his world was settled, Miki took once more to hunting.
+The thrill of the trail came back to him, and wider and wider grew
+his range from the cabin. Again he followed Le Beau's old
+trapline. But the traps were sprung now. He had lost a great deal
+of his old caution. He had grown fatter. He no longer scented
+danger in every whiff of the wind. It was in the third week of
+Challoner's stay at the cabin, the day which marked the end of the
+cold spell and the beginning of warm weather, that Miki came upon
+an old dead-fall in a swamp a full ten miles from the clearing. Le
+Beau had set it for lynx, but nothing had touched the bait, which
+was a chunk of caribou flesh, frozen solid as a rock. Curiously
+Miki began smelling of it. He no longer feared danger. Menace had
+gone out of his world. He nibbled. He pulled--and the log crashed
+down to break his back. Only by a little did it fail. For twenty-
+four hours it held him helpless and crippled. Then, fighting
+through all those hours, he dragged himself out from under it.
+With the rising temperature a soft snow had fallen, covering all
+tracks and trails. Through this snow Miki dragged himself, leaving
+a path like that of an otter in the mud, for his hind quarters
+were helpless. His back was not broken; it was temporarily
+paralyzed by the blow and the weight of the log.
+
+He made in the direction of the cabin, but every foot that he
+dragged himself was filled with agony, and his progress was so
+slow that at the end of an hour he had not gone more than a
+quarter of a mile. Another night found him less than two miles
+from the deadfall. He pulled himself under a shelter of brush and
+lay there until dawn. All through that day he did not move. The
+next, which was the fourth since he had left the cabin to hunt,
+the pain in his back was not so great. But he could pull himself
+through the snow only a few yards at a time. Again the good spirit
+of the forests favoured him for in the afternoon he came upon the
+partly eaten carcass of a buck killed by the wolves. The flesh was
+frozen but he gnawed at it ravenously. Then he found himself a
+shelter under a mass of fallen tree-tops, and for ten days
+thereafter he lay between life and death. He would have died had
+it not been for the buck. To the carcass he managed to drag
+himself, sometimes each day and sometimes every other day, and
+kept himself from starving. It was the end of the second week
+before he could stand well on his feet. The fifteenth day he
+returned to the cabin.
+
+In the edge of the clearing there fell upon him slowly a
+foreboding of great change. The cabin was there. It was no
+different than it had been fifteen days ago. But out of the
+chimney there came no smoke, and the windows were white with
+frost. About it the snow lay clean and white, like an unspotted
+sheet. He made his way hesitatingly across the clearing to the
+door. There were no tracks. Drifted snow was piled high over the
+sill. He whined, and scratched at the door. There was no answer.
+And he heard no sound.
+
+He went back into the edge of the timber, and waited. He waited
+all through that day, going occasionally to the cabin, and
+smelling about it, to convince himself that he had not made a
+mistake. When darkness came he hollowed himself out a bed in the
+fresh snow close to the door and lay there all through the night.
+Day came again, gray and empty and still there was no smoke from
+the chimney or sound from within the log walls, and at last he
+knew that Challoner and Nanette and the baby were gone. But he was
+hopeful. He no longer listened for sound from within the cabin,
+but watched and listened for them to come from out of the forest.
+He made short quests, hunting now on this side and now on that of
+the cabin, sniffing futilely at the fresh and trackless snow and
+pointing the wind for minutes at a time. In the afternoon, with a
+forlorn slouch to his body, he went deeper into the forest to hunt
+for a rabbit. When he had killed and eaten his supper he returned
+again and slept a second night in the burrow beside the door. A
+third day and a third night he remained, and the third night he
+heard the wolves howling under a clear and star-filled sky, and
+from him there came his first cry--a yearning, grief-filled cry
+that rose wailingly out of the clearing; the entreaty for his
+master, for Nanette, and the baby. It was not an answer to the
+wolves. In its note there was a trembling fear, the voicing of a
+thing that had grown into hopelessness.
+
+And now there settled upon him a loneliness greater than any
+loneliness he had ever known. Something seemed to whisper to his
+canine brain that all he had seen and felt had been but a dream,
+and that he was face to face with his old world again, its
+dangers, its vast and soul-breaking emptiness, its friendlessness,
+its ceaseless strife for existence. His instincts, dulled by the
+worship of what the cabin had held, became keenly alive. He sensed
+again the sharp thrill of danger, which comes of ALONENESS, and
+his old caution fell upon him, so that the fourth day he slunk
+around the edge of the clearing like a wolf.
+
+The fifth night he did not sleep in the clearing but found himself
+a windfall a mile back in the forest. That night he had strange
+and troubled dreams. They were not of Challoner, or of Nanette and
+the baby, nor were they of the fight and the unforgettable things
+he had seen at the Post. His dreams were of a high and barren
+ridge smothered in deep snow, and of a cavern that was dark and
+deep. Again he was with his brother and comrade of days that were
+gone--Neewa the bear. He was trying to waken him, and he could
+feel the warmth of his body and hear his sleepy, protesting
+grunts. And then, later, he was fighting again in the paradise of
+black currants, and with Neewa was running for his life from the
+enraged she-bear who had invaded their coulee. When he awoke
+suddenly from out of these dreams he was trembling and his muscles
+were tense. He growled in the darkness. His eyes were round balls
+of searching fire. He whined softly and yearningly in that pit of
+gloom under the windfall, and for a moment or two he listened, for
+he thought that Neewa might answer.
+
+For a month after that night he remained near the cabin. At least
+once each day, and sometimes at night, he would return to the
+clearing. And more and more frequently he was thinking of Neewa.
+Early in March came the Tiki-Swao--(the Big Thaw). For a week the
+sun shone without a cloud in the sky. The air was warm. The snow
+turned soft underfoot and on the sunny sides of slopes and ridges
+it melted away into trickling streams or rolled down in "slides"
+that were miniature avalanches. The world was vibrant with a new
+thrill. It pulsed with the growing heart-beat of spring, and in
+Miki's soul there arose slowly a new hope, a new impression a new
+inspiration that was the thrilling urge of a wonderful instinct.
+NEEWA WOULD BE WAKING NOW!
+
+It came to him at last like a voice which he could understand. The
+trickling music of the growing streams sang it to him; he heard it
+in the warm winds that were no longer filled with the blast of
+winter; he caught it in the new odours that were rising out of the
+earth; he smelled it in the dank, sweet perfume of the black
+woods-soil. The thing thrilled him. It called him. And he KNEW!
+
+NEEWA WOULD BE WAKING NOW!
+
+He responded to the call. It was in the nature of things that no
+power less than physical force could hold him back. And yet he did
+not travel as he had travelled from Challoner's camp to the cabin
+of Nanette and the baby. There had been a definite object there,
+something to achieve, something to spur him on to an immediate
+fulfilment. Now the thing that drew him, at first, was an
+overpowering impulse, not a reality. For two or three days his
+trail westward was wandering and indefinite. Then it straightened
+out, and early in the morning of the fifth day he came from a deep
+forest into a plain, and across that plain he saw the ridge. For a
+long time he gazed over the level space before he went on.
+
+In his brain the pictures of Neewa were becoming clearer and
+clearer. After all, it seemed only yesterday or the day before
+that he had gone away from that ridge. Then it was smothered in
+snow, and a gray, terrible gloom had settled upon the earth. Now
+there was but little snow, and the sun was shining, and the sky
+was blue again. He went on, and sniffed along the foot of the
+ridge; he had not forgotten the way. He was not excited, because
+time had ceased to have definite import for him. Yesterday he had
+come down from that ridge, and to-day he was going back. He went
+straight to the mouth of Neewa's den, which was uncovered now, and
+thrust in his head and shoulders, and sniffed. Ah! but that lazy
+rascal of a bear was a sleepy-head! He was still sleeping. Miki
+could smell him. Listening hard, he could HEAR him.
+
+He climbed over the low drift of snow that had packed itself in
+the neck of the cavern and entered confidently into the darkness.
+He heard a soft, sleepy grunt and a great sigh. He almost stumbled
+over Neewa, who had changed his bed. Again Neewa grunted, and Miki
+whined. He ran his muzzle into Neewa's fresh, new coat of spring
+fur and smelled his way to Neewa's ear. After all, it was only
+yesterday! And he remembered everything now! So he gave Neewa's
+ear a sudden sharp nip with his teeth, and then he barked in that
+low, throaty way that Neewa had always understood.
+
+"Wake up, Neewa," it all said. "Wake up! The snow is gone, and
+it's fine out to-day. WAKE UP!"
+
+And Neewa, stretching himself, gave a great yawn.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
+
+
+Meshaba, the old Cree, sat on the sunny side of a rock on the
+sunny side of a slope that looked up and down the valley. Meshaba
+--who many, many years ago had been called The Giant--was very old.
+He was so old that even the Factor's books over at Fort O' God had
+no record of his birth; nor the "post logs" at Albany House, or
+Cumberland House, or Norway House, or Fort Churchill. Perhaps
+farther north, at Lac La Biche, at Old Fort Resolution, or at Fort
+McPherson some trace of him might have been found. His skin was
+crinkled and weather-worn, like dry buckskin, and over his brown,
+thin face his hair fell to his shoulders, snow-white. His hands
+were thin, even his nose was thin with the thinness of age. But
+his eyes were still like dark garnets, and down through the
+greater part of a century their vision had come undimmed.
+
+They roved over the valley now. At Meshaba's back, a mile on the
+other side of the ridge, was the old trapper's cabin, where he
+lived alone. The winter had been long and cold, and in his
+gladness at the coming of spring Meshaba had come up the ridge to
+bask in the sun and look out over the changing world. For an hour
+his eyes had travelled up and down the valley like the eyes of an
+old and wary hawk. The dark spruce and cedar forest edged in the
+far side of the valley; between that and the ridge rolled the
+meadowy plain--still covered with melting snow in places, and in
+others bare and glowing, a dull green in the sunlight. From where
+he sat Meshaba could also see a rocky scarp of the ridge that
+projected out into the plain a hundred yards away. But this did
+not interest him, except that if it had not been in his line of
+vision he could have seen a mile farther down the valley.
+
+In that hour of Sphinx-like watching, while the smoke curled
+slowly up from his black pipe, Meshaba had seen life. Half a mile
+from where he was sitting a band of caribou had come out of the
+timber and wandered into a less distant patch of low bush. They
+had not thrilled his old blood with the desire to kill, for there
+was already a fresh carcass hung up at the back of his cabin.
+Still farther away he had seen a hornless moose, so grotesque in
+its spring ugliness that the parchment-like skin of his face had
+cracked for half an instant in a smile, and out of him had come a
+low and appreciative grunt; for Meshaba, in spite of his age,
+still had a sense of humour left. Once he had seen a wolf, and
+twice a fox, and now his eyes were on an eagle high over his head.
+Meshaba would not have shot that eagle, for year after year it had
+come down through time with him, and it was always there soaring
+in the sun when spring came. So Meshaba grunted as he watched it,
+and was glad that Upisk had not died during the winter.
+
+"Kata y ati sisew," he whispered to himself, a glow of
+superstition in his fiery eyes. "We have lived long together, and
+it is fated that we die together, Oh Upisk. The spring has come
+for us many times, and soon the black winter will swallow us up
+for ever."
+
+His eyes shifted slowly, and then they rested on the scarp of the
+ridge that shut out his vision. His heart gave a sudden thump in
+his body. His pipe fell from his mouth to his hand; and he stared
+without moving, stared like a thing of rock.
+
+On a flat sunlit shelf not more than eighty or ninety yards away
+stood a young black bear. In the warm glow of the sunlight the
+bear's spring coat shone like polished jet. But it was not the
+sudden appearance of the bear that amazed Meshaba. It was the fact
+that another animal was standing shoulder to shoulder with
+Wakayoo, and that it was not a brother bear, but a huge wolf.
+Slowly one of his thin hands rose to his eyes and he wiped away
+what he thought must surely be a strange something that was
+fooling his vision. In all his eighty years and odd he had never
+known a wolf to be thus friendly with a bear. Nature had made them
+enemies. Nature had fore-doomed their hatred to be the deepest
+hatred of the forests. Therefore, for a space, Meshaba doubted his
+eyes. But in another moment he saw that the miracle had truly come
+to pass. For the wolf turned broadside to him and it WAS a wolf! A
+huge, big-boned beast that stood as high at the shoulders as
+Wakayoo, the bear; a great beast, with a great head, and--
+
+It was then that Meshaba's heart gave another thump, for the tail
+of a wolf is big and bushy in the springtime, and the tail of this
+beast was as bare of hair as a beaver's tail!
+
+"Ohne moosh!" gasped Meshaba, under his breath--"a dog!"
+
+He seemed to draw slowly into himself, slinking backward. His
+rifle stood just out of reach on the other side of the rock.
+
+At the other end of that eighty or ninety yards Neewa and Miki
+stood blinking in the bright sunlight, with the mouth of the
+cavern in which Neewa had slept so many months just behind them.
+Miki was puzzled. Again it seemed to him that it was only
+yesterday, and not months ago, that he had left Neewa in that den,
+sleeping his lazy head off. And now that he had returned to him
+after his own hard winter in the forests he was astonished to find
+Neewa so big. For Neewa had grown steadily through his four
+months' nap and he was half again as big as when he went to sleep.
+Could Miki have spoken Cree, and had Meshaba given him the
+opportunity, he might have explained the situation.
+
+"You see, Mr. Indian"--he might have said--"this dub of a bear and
+I have been pals from just about the time we were born. A man
+named Challoner tied us together first when Neewa, there, was just
+about as big as your head, and we did a lot of scrapping before we
+got properly acquainted. Then we got lost, and after that we
+hitched up like brothers; and we had a lot of fun and excitement
+all through last summer, until at last, when the cold weather
+came, Neewa hunted up this hole in the ground and the lazy cuss
+went to sleep for all winter. I won't mention what happened to me
+during the winter. It was a-plenty. So this spring I had a hunch
+it was about time for Neewa to get the cobwebs out of his fool
+head, and came back. And--here we are! But tell me this: WHAT
+MAKES NEEWA SO BIG?"
+
+It was at least that thought--the bigness of Neewa--that was
+filling Miki's head at the present moment. And Meshaba, in place
+of listening to an explanation, was reaching for his rifle--while
+Neewa, with his brown muzzle sniffing the wind, was gathering in a
+strange smell. Of the three, Neewa saw nothing to be wondered at
+in the situation itself. When he had gone to sleep four and a half
+months ago Miki was at his side; and to-day, when he awoke, Miki
+was still at his side. The four and a half months meant nothing to
+him. Many times he and Miki had gone to sleep, and had awakened
+together. For all the knowledge he had of time it might have been
+only last night that he had fallen asleep.
+
+The one thing that made Neewa uneasy now was that strange odour he
+had caught in the air. Instinctively he seized upon it as a
+menace--at least as something that he would rather NOT smell than
+smell. So he turned away with a warning WOOF to Miki. When Meshaba
+peered around the edge of the rock, expecting an easy shot, he
+caught only a flash of the two as they were disappearing. He fired
+quickly.
+
+To Miki and Neewa the report of the rifle and the moaning whirr of
+the bullet over their backs recalled memories of a host of things,
+and Neewa settled down to that hump-backed, flat-eared flight of
+his that kept Miki pegging along at a brisk pace for at least a
+mile. Then Neewa stopped, puffing audibly. Inasmuch as he had had
+nothing to eat for a third of a year, and was weak from long
+inactivity, the run came within an ace of putting him out of
+business. It was several minutes before he could gather his wind
+sufficiently to grunt. Miki, meanwhile, was carefully smelling of
+him from his rump to his muzzle. There was apparently nothing
+missing, for he gave a delighted little yap at the end, and, in
+spite of his size and the dignity of increased age, he began
+frisking about Neewa In a manner emphatically expressive of his
+joy at his comrade's awakening.
+
+"It's been a deuce of a lonely winter, Neewa, and I'm tickled to
+death to see you on your feet again," his antics said. "What'll we
+do? Go for a hunt?"
+
+This seemed to be the thought in Neewa's mind, for he headed
+straight up the valley until they came to an open fen where he
+proceeded to quest about for a dinner of roots and grass; and as
+he searched he grunted--grunted in his old, companionable, cubbish
+way. And Miki, hunting with him, found that once more the
+loneliness had gone out of his world.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
+
+
+To Miki and Neewa, especially Neewa, there seemed nothing
+extraordinary in the fact that they were together again, and that
+their comradeship was resumed. Although during his months of
+hibernation Neewa's body had grown, his mind had not changed its
+memories or its pictures. It had not passed through a mess of
+stirring events such as had made the winter a thrilling one for
+Miki, and so it was Neewa who accepted the new situation most
+casually. He went on feeding as if nothing at all unusual had
+happened during the past four months, and after the edge had gone
+from his first hunger he fell into his old habit of looking to
+Miki for leadership. And Miki fell into the old ways as though
+only a day or a week and not four months had lapsed in their
+brotherhood. It is possible that he tried mightily to tell Neewa
+what had happened. At least he must have had that desire--to let
+him know in what a strange way he had found his old master,
+Challoner, and how he had lost him again. And also how he found
+the woman, Nanette, and the little baby Nanette, and how for a
+long time he had lived with them and loved them as he had never
+loved anything else on earth.
+
+It was the old cabin, far to the north and east, that drew him
+now--the cabin in which Nanette and the baby had lived; and it was
+toward this cabin that he lured Neewa during the first two weeks
+of their hunting. They did not travel quickly, largely because of
+Neewa's voracious spring appetite and the fact that it consumed
+nine tenths of his waking hours to keep full on such provender as
+roots and swelling buds and grass. During the first week Miki grew
+either hopeless or disgusted in his hunting. One day he killed
+five rabbits and Neewa ate four of them and grunted piggishly for
+more.
+
+If Miki had stood amazed and appalled at Neewa's appetite in the
+days of their cubhood and puppyhood a year ago, he was more than
+astounded now, for in the matter of food Neewa was a bottomless
+pit. On the other hand he was jollier than ever, and in their
+wrestling matches he was almost more than a match for Miki, being
+nearly again as heavy. He very soon acquired the habit of taking
+advantage of this superiority of weight, and at unexpected moments
+he would hop on Miki and pin him to the ground, his fat body
+smothering him like a huge soft cushion, and his arms holding him
+until at times Miki could scarcely squirm. Now and then, hugging
+him in this embrace, he would roll over and over, both of them
+snarling and growling as though in deadly combat. This play,
+though he was literally the under dog, delighted Miki until one
+day they rolled over the edge of a deep ravine and crashed in a
+dog-and-bear avalanche to the bottom. After that, for a long time,
+Neewa did not roll with his victim. Whenever Miki wanted to end a
+bout, however, all he had to do was to give Neewa a sharp nip with
+his long fangs and the bear would uncoil himself and hop to his
+feet like a spring. He had a most serious respect for Miki's
+teeth.
+
+But Miki's greatest moments of joy were where Neewa stood up man-
+fashion. Then was a real tussle. And his greatest hours of disgust
+were when Neewa stretched himself out in a tree for a nap.
+
+It was the beginning of the third week before they came one day to
+the cabin. There was no change in it, and Miki's body sagged
+disconsolately as he and Neewa looked at it from the edge of the
+clearing. No smoke, no sign of life, and the window was broken
+now--probably by an inquisitive bear or a wolverine. Miki went to
+the window and stood up to it, sniffing inside. The SMELL was
+still there--so faint that he could only just detect it. But that
+was all. The big room was empty except for the stove, a table and
+a few bits of rude furniture. All else was gone. Three or four
+times during the next half hour Miki stood up at the window, and
+at last Neewa--urged by his curiosity--did likewise. He also
+detected the faint odour that was left in the cabin. He sniffed at
+it for a long time. It was like the smell he had caught the day he
+came out of his den--and yet different. It was fainter, more
+elusive, and not so unpleasant.
+
+For a month thereafter Miki insisted on hunting in the vicinity of
+the cabin, held there by the "pull" of the thing which he could
+neither analyze nor quite understand. Neewa accepted the situation
+good-naturedly for a time. Then he lost patience and surrendered
+himself to a grouch for three whole days during which he wandered
+at his own sweet will. To preserve the alliance Miki was compelled
+to follow him. Berry time--early July--found them sixty miles
+north and west of the cabin, in the edge of the country where
+Neewa was born.
+
+But there were few berries that summer of bebe nak um geda (the
+summer of drought and fire). As early as the middle of July a
+thin, gray film began to hover in palpitating waves over the
+forests. For three weeks there had been no rain. Even the nights
+were hot and dry. Each day the factors at their posts looked out
+with anxious eyes over their domains, and by the first of August
+every post had a score of halfbreeds and Indians patrolling the
+trails on the watch for fire. In their cabins and teepees the
+forest dwellers who had not gone to pass the summer at the posts
+waited and watched; each morning and noon and night they climbed
+tall trees and peered through that palpitating gray film for a
+sign of smoke. For weeks the wind came steadily from the south and
+west, parched as though swept over the burning sands of a desert.
+Berries dried up on the bushes; the fruit of the mountain ash
+shriveled on its stems; creeks ran dry; swamps turned into baked
+peat, and the poplar leaves hung wilted and lifeless, too limp to
+rustle in the breeze. Only once or twice in a lifetime does the
+forest dweller see poplar leaves curl up and die like that, baked
+to death in the summer sun. It is Kiskewahoon (the Danger Signal).
+Not only the warning of possible death in a holocaust of fire, but
+the omen of poor hunting and trapping in the winter to come.
+
+Miki and Neewa were in a swamp country when the fifth of August
+came. In the lowland it was sweltering. Neewa's tongue hung from
+his mouth, and Miki was panting as they made their way along a
+black and sluggish stream that was like a great ditch and as dead
+as the day itself. There was no visible sun, but a red and lurid
+glow filled the sky--the sun struggling to fight its way through
+the smothering film that had grown thicker over the earth. Because
+they were in a "pocket"--a sweep of tangled country lower than the
+surrounding country--Neewa and Miki were not caught in this
+blackening cloud. Five miles away they might have heard the
+thunder of cloven hoofs and the crash of heavy bodies in their
+flight before the deadly menace of fire. As it was they made their
+way slowly through the parched swamp, so that it was midday when
+they came out of the edge of it and up through a green fringe of
+timber to the top of a ridge. Before this hour neither had passed
+through the horror of a forest fire. But it seized upon them now.
+It needed no past experience. The cumulative instinct of a
+thousand generations leapt through their brains and bodies. Their
+world was in the grip of Iskootao (the Fire Devil). To the south
+and the east and the west it was buried in a pall like the
+darkness of night, and out of the far edge of the swamp through
+which they had come they caught the first livid spurts of flame.
+From that direction, now that they were out of the "pocket," they
+felt a hot wind, and with that wind came a dull and rumbling roar
+that was like the distant moaning of a cataract. They waited, and
+watched, struggling to get their bearings, their minds fighting
+for a few moments in the gigantic process of changing instinct
+into reasoning and understanding. Neewa, being a bear, was
+afflicted with the near-sightedness of his breed, and he could see
+neither the black tornado of smoke bearing down upon them nor the
+flames leaping out of the swamp. But he could SMELL, and his nose
+was twisted into a hundred wrinkles, and even ahead of Miki he was
+ready for flight. But Miki, whose vision was like a hawk's, stood
+as if fascinated.
+
+The roaring grew more distinct. It seemed on all sides of them.
+But it was from the south that there came the first storm of ash
+rushing noiselessly ahead of the fire, and after that the smoke.
+It was then that Miki turned with a strange whine but it was Neewa
+now who took the lead--Neewa, whose forebears had ten thousand
+times run this same wild race with death in the centuries since
+their world was born. He did not need the keenness of far vision
+now. He KNEW. He knew what was behind, and what was on either
+side, and where the one trail to safety lay; and in the air he
+felt and smelled the thing that was death. Twice Miki made efforts
+to swing their course into the east, but Neewa would have none of
+it. With flattened ears he went on NORTH. Three times Miki stopped
+to turn and face the galloping menace behind them, but never for
+an instant did Neewa pause. Straight on--NORTH, NORTH, NORTH--
+north to the higher lands, the big waters, the open plains.
+
+They were not alone. A caribou sped past them with the swiftness
+of the wind itself. "FAST, FAST, FAST!"--Neewa's instinct cried;
+"but--ENDURE! For the caribou, speeding even faster than the fire,
+will fall of exhaustion shortly and be eaten up by the flames.
+FAST--but ENDURE!"
+
+And steadily, stoically, at his loping gait Neewa led on.
+
+A bull moose swung half across their trail from the west, wind-
+gone and panting as though his throat were cut. He was badly
+burned, and running blindly into the eastern wall of fire.
+
+Behind and on either side, where the flames were rushing on with
+the pitiless ferocity of hunnish regiments, the harvest of death
+was a vast and shuddering reality. In hollow logs, under
+windfalls, in the thick tree-tops, and in the earth itself, the
+smaller things of the wilderness sought their refuge--and died.
+Rabbits became leaping balls of flame, then lay shrivelled and
+black; the marten were baked in their trees; fishers and mink and
+ermine crawled into the deepest corners of the windfalls and died
+there by inches; owls fluttered out of their tree-tops, staggered
+for a few moments in the fiery air, and fell down into the heart
+of the flame. No creature made a sound--except the porcupines; and
+as they died they cried like little children.
+
+In the green spruce and cedar timber, heavy with the pitch that
+made their thick tops spurt into flame like a sea of explosive,
+the fire rushed on with a tremendous roar. From it--in a straight
+race--there was no escape for man or beast. Out of that world of
+conflagration there might have risen one great, yearning cry to
+heaven: WATER--WATER--WATER! Wherever there was water there was
+also hope--and life. Breed and blood and wilderness feuds were
+forgotten in the great hour of peril. Every lake became a haven of
+refuge.
+
+To such a lake came Neewa, guided by an unerring instinct and
+sense of smell sharpened by the rumble and roar of the storm of
+fire behind him. Miki had "lost" himself; his senses were dulled;
+his nostrils caught no scent but that of a world in flames--so,
+blindly, he followed his comrade. The fire was enveloping the lake
+along its western shore, and its water was already thickly
+tenanted. It was not a large lake, and almost round. Its diameter
+was not more than two hundred yards. Farther out--a few of them
+swimming, but most of them standing on bottom with only their
+heads out of water--were a score of caribou and moose. Many other
+shorter-legged creatures were swimming aimlessly, turning this way
+and that, paddling their feet only enough to keep afloat. On the
+shore where Neewa and Miki paused was a huge porcupine, chattering
+and chuckling foolishly, as if scolding all things in general for
+having disturbed him at dinner. Then he took to the water. A
+little farther up the shore a fisher-cat and a fox hugged close to
+the water line, hesitating to wet their precious fur until death
+itself snapped at their heels; and as if to bring fresh news of
+this death a second fox dragged himself wearily out on the shore,
+as limp as a wet rag after his swim from the opposite shore, where
+the fire was already leaping in a wall of flame. And as this fox
+swam in, hoping to find safety, an old bear twice as big as Neewa,
+crashed panting from the undergrowth, plunged into the water, and
+swam OUT. Smaller things were creeping and crawling and slinking
+along the shore; little red-eyed ermine, marten, and mink,
+rabbits, squirrels, and squeaking gophers, and a horde of mice.
+And at last, with these things which he would have devoured so
+greedily running about him, Neewa waded slowly out into the water.
+Miki followed until he was submerged to his shoulders. Then he
+stopped. The fire was close now, advancing like a race-horse. Over
+the protecting barrier of thick timber drove the clouds of smoke
+and ash. Swiftly the lake became obliterated, and now out of that
+awful chaos of blackness and smoke and heat there rose strange and
+thrilling cries; the bleating of a moose calf that was doomed to
+die and the bellowing, terror-filled response of its mother; the
+agonized howling of a wolf; the terrified barking of a fox, and
+over all else the horrible screaming of a pair of loons whose home
+had been transformed into a sea of flame.
+
+Through the thickening smoke and increasing heat Neewa gave his
+call to Miki as he began to swim, and with an answering whine Miki
+plunged after him, swimming so close to his big black brother that
+his muzzle touched the other's flank. In mid-lake Neewa did as the
+other swimming creatures were doing--paddled only enough to keep
+himself afloat; but for Miki, big of bone and unassisted by a
+life-preserver of fat, the struggle was not so easy. He was forced
+to swim to keep afloat. A dozen times he circled around Neewa, and
+then, with something of the situation driven upon him, he came up
+close to the bear and rested his forepaws on his shoulders.
+
+The lake was now encircled by a solid wall of fire. Blasts of
+flame shot up the pitch-laden trees and leapt for fifty feet into
+the blistering air. The roar of the conflagration was deafening.
+It drowned all sound that brute agony and death may have made. And
+its heat was terrific. For a few terrible minutes the air which
+Miki drew into his lungs was like fire itself. Neewa plunged his
+head under water every few seconds, but it was not Miki's instinct
+to do this. Like the wolf and the fox and the fisher-cat and the
+lynx it was his nature to die before completely submerging
+himself.
+
+Swift as it had come the fire passed; and the walls of timber that
+had been green a few moments before were black and shrivelled and
+dead; and sound swept on with the flame until it became once more
+only a low and rumbling murmur.
+
+To the black and smouldering shores the live things slowly made
+their way. Of all the creatures that had taken refuge in the lake
+many had died. Chief of those were the porcupines. All had
+drowned.
+
+Close to the shore the heat was still intense, and for hours the
+earth was hot with smouldering fire. All the rest of that day and
+the night that followed no living thing moved out of the shallow
+water. And yet no living thing thought to prey upon its neighbour.
+The great peril had made of all beasts kin.
+
+A little before dawn of the day following the fire relief came. A
+deluge of rain fell, and when day broke and the sun shone through
+a murky heaven there was left no sign of what the lake had been,
+except for the dead bodies that floated on its surface or lined
+its shores. The living things had returned into their desolated
+wilderness--and among them Neewa and Miki.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
+
+
+For many days after the Great Fire it was Neewa who took the lead.
+All their world was a black and lifeless desolation and Miki would
+not have known which way to turn. Had it been a local fire of
+small extent he would have "wandered" out of its charred path. But
+the conflagration had been immense. It had swept over a vast reach
+of country, and for a half of the creatures who had saved
+themselves in the lakes and streams there was only a death by
+starvation left.
+
+But not for Neewa and his breed. Just as there had been no
+indecision in the manner and direction of his flight before the
+fire so there was now no hesitation in the direction he chose to
+seek a live world again. It was due north and west--as straight as
+a die. If they came to a lake, and went around it, Neewa would
+always follow the shore until he came directly opposite his trail
+on the other side of the lake--and then strike north and west
+again. He travelled steadily, not only by day but also by night,
+with only short intervals of rest, and the dawning of the second
+morning found Miki more exhausted than the bear.
+
+There were many evidences now that they had reached a point where
+the fire had begun to burn itself out. Patches of green timber
+were left standing, there were swamps unscathed by the flames, and
+here and there they came upon green patches of meadow. In the
+swamps and timber they feasted, for these oases in what had been a
+sea of flame were filled with food ready to be preyed upon and
+devoured. For the first time Neewa refused to stop because there
+was plenty to eat. The sixth day they were a hundred miles from
+the lake in which they had sought refuge from the fire.
+
+It was a wonderful country of green timber, of wide plains and of
+many lakes and streams--cut up by a thousand usayow (low ridges),
+which made the best of hunting. Because it was a country of many
+waters, with live streams running between the ridges and from lake
+to lake, it had not suffered from the drought like the country
+farther south. For a month Neewa and Miki hunted in their new
+paradise, and became fat and happy again.
+
+It was in September that they came upon a strange thing in the
+edge of a swamp. At first Miki thought that it was a cabin; but it
+was a great deal smaller than any cabin he had known. It was not
+much larger than the cage of saplings in which Le Beau had kept
+him. But it was made of heavy logs, and the logs were notched so
+that nothing could knock them down. And these logs, instead of
+lying closely one on the other, had open spaces six or eight
+inches wide between them. And there was a wide-open door. From
+this strange contraption there came a strong odour of over-ripened
+fish. The smell repelled Miki. But it was a powerful attraction to
+Neewa, who persisted in remaining near it in spite of all Miki
+could do to drag him away. Finally, disgusted at his comrade's bad
+taste, Miki sulked off alone to hunt. It was some time after that
+before Neewa dared to thrust his head and shoulders through the
+opening. The smell of the fish made his little eyes gleam.
+Cautiously he stepped inside the queer looking thing of logs.
+Nothing happened. He saw the fish, all he could eat, just on the
+other side of a sapling against which he must lean to reach them.
+He went deliberately to the sapling, leaned over, and then!--
+
+"CRASH!"
+
+He whirled about as if shot. There was no longer an opening where
+he had entered. The sapling "trigger" had released an over-head
+door, and Neewa was a prisoner. He was not excited, but accepted
+the situation quite coolly, probably having no doubt in his mind
+that somewhere there was an aperture between the logs large enough
+for him to squeeze through. After a few inquisitive sniffs he
+proceeded to devour the fish. He was absorbed in his odoriferous
+feast when out of a clump of dwarf balsams a few yards away
+appeared an Indian. He quickly took in the situation, turned, and
+disappeared.
+
+Half an hour later this Indian ran into a clearing in which were
+the recently constructed buildings of a new Post. He made for the
+Company store. In the fur-carpeted "office" of this store a man
+was bending fondly over a woman. The Indian saw them as he
+entered, and chuckled. "Sakehewawin" ("the love couple"); that was
+what they had already come to call them at Post Lac Bain--this man
+and woman who had given them a great feast when the missioner had
+married them not so very long ago. The man and the woman stood up
+when the Indian entered, and the woman smiled at him. She was
+beautiful. Her eyes were glowing, and there was the flush of a
+flower in her cheeks. The Indian felt the worship of her warm in
+his heart.
+
+"Oo-ee, we have caught the bear," he said. "But it is napao (a he-
+bear). There is no cub, Iskwao Nanette!"
+
+The white man chuckled.
+
+"Aren't we having the darndest luck getting you a cub for a house-
+pet, Nanette?" he asked. "I'd have sworn this mother and her cub
+would have been easily caught. A he-bear! We'll have to let him
+loose, Mootag. His pelt is good for nothing. Do you want to go
+with us and see the fun, Nanette?"
+
+She nodded, her little laugh filled with the joy of love and life.
+
+"Oui. It will be such fun--to see him go!"
+
+ Challoner led the way, with an axe in his hand; and with him came
+Nanette, her hand in his. Mootag followed with his rifle, prepared
+for an emergency. From the thick screen of balsams Challoner
+peered forth, then made a hole through which Nanette might look at
+the cage and its prisoner. For a moment or two she held her breath
+as she watched Neewa pacing back and forth, very much excited now.
+Then she gave a little cry, and Challoner felt her fingers pinch
+his own sharply. Before he knew what she was about to do she had
+thrust herself through the screen of balsams.
+
+Close to the log prison, faithful to his comrade in the hour of
+peril, lay Miki. He was exhausted from digging at the earth under
+the lower log, and he had not smelled or heard anything of the
+presence of others until he saw Nanette standing not twenty paces
+away. His heart leapt up into his panting throat. He swallowed, as
+though to get rid of a great lump; he stared. And then, with a
+sudden, yearning whine, he sprang toward her. With a yell
+Challoner leapt out of the balsams with uplifted axe. But before
+the axe could fall, Miki was in Nanette's arms, and Challoner
+dropped his weapon with a gasp of amazement--and one word:
+
+"MIKI!"
+
+Mootag, looking on in stupid astonishment, saw both the man and
+the woman making a great fuss over a strange and wild-looking
+beast that looked as if it ought to be killed. They had forgotten
+the bear. And Miki, wildly joyous at finding his beloved master
+and mistress, had forgotten him also. It was a prodigious WHOOF
+from Neewa himself that brought their attention to him. Like a
+flash Miki was back at the pen smelling of Neewa's snout between
+two of the logs, and with a great wagging of tail trying to make
+him understand what had happened.
+
+Slowly, with a thought born in his head that made him oblivious of
+all else but the big black brute in the pen, Challoner approached
+the trap. Was it possible that Miki could have made friends with
+any other bear than the cub of long ago? He drew in a deep breath
+as he looked at them. Neewa's brown-tipped nose was thrust between
+two of the logs and MIKI WAS LICKING IT WITH HIS TONGUE! He held
+out a hand to Nanette, and when she came to him he pointed for a
+space, without speaking.
+
+Then he said:
+
+"It is the cub, Nanette. You know--the cub I have told you about.
+They've stuck together all this time--ever since I killed the
+cub's mother a year and a half ago, and tied them together on a
+piece of rope. I understand now why Miki ran away from us when we
+were at the cabin. He went back--to the bear."
+
+ To-day if you strike northward from Le Pas and put your canoe in
+the Rat River or Grassberry waterways, and thence paddle and run
+with the current down the Reindeer River and along the east shore
+of Reindeer Lake you will ultimately come to the Cochrane--and
+Post Lac Bain. It is one of the most wonderful countries in all
+the northland. Three hundred Indians, breeds and French, come with
+their furs to Lac Bain. Not a soul among them--man, woman, or
+child--but knows the story of the "tame bear of Lac Bain"--the pet
+of l'ange, the white angel, the Factor's wife.
+
+The bear wears a shining collar and roams at will in the company
+of a great dog, but, having grown huge and fat now, never wanders
+far from the Post. And it is an unwritten law in all that country
+that the animal must not be harmed, and that no bear traps shall
+be set within five miles of the Company buildings. Beyond that
+limit the bear never roams; and when it comes cold, and he goes
+into his long sleep, he crawls into a deep warm cavern that has
+been dug for him under the Company storehouse. And with him, when
+the nights come, sleeps Miki the dog.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
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