Part 5 (1/2)

Like a flash the she-wolf turned, her fangs bared the length of her jaws and her bloodshot eyes agloith 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 hione 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-sun had been But his drea 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 er a mother But there re Out of it came the thrill and the perfume of life And close to him--very close--was the rich, sweet srily Then he turned, and saa's black and pudgy body tu 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, atching over thereat 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 hiether as Neewa and Miki had done Therefore, he would have said, the Beneficent Spirit atched over the affairs of four-legged beastsIt was she--Iskoo Wapoo was a Goddess and not a God--who hadblack bear; and it was she who had induced hiether 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 theer before har of their adventures, and on thiswhen they ca with a white uide He would never know that Iskoo Wapoo was at his side that verythat 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 ed themselves completely in the present The few days of thrill and adventure through which they had gone seerown less and less insistent, and Miki's lostwith hi in their ht for life with thecaribou 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 thesun 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 e of this dip Miki could look down--and so far away that the wonder of what he saw dissolved itself at last into the shi+mmer of the sun and the blue of the sky Within his vision lay a paradise of reen ed into the deeper forest that began with the farther ridge; great patches of bush radiant with the colouring of June; here and there the gleaiant reen fraun, the she-wolf, had gone He wondered whether she would coer the un to tell hi 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 un's teeth would have snapped his shoulder, or slashed his throat to the jugular TEBAH-GONE-GAWIN (the One Great Laas i 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 friendshi+p except in the heart of Neewa, theat a gay-plu about for a hed a dozen pounds; noeighed fourteen or fifteen His sto, and he sat hu his chops and vastly contented with hiave a churunt Then he rolled over on his fat back and invited Miki to play It was the first ti and biting and kicking, and interjecting their friendly scrirunts and squeals on Neewa's, they rolled to the edge of the dip It was a good hundred feet to the bottorassy 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 doisting and so himself into knots until by the tie 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 hirling round and round in a sickening circle Then he pulled hiether, and made out Neewa a dozen feet away

Neeas 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” ed his scattered wits Neewa climbed twenty or thirty feet up the slope and deliberately rolled down again! Miki's jaws fell apart in aain Neewa cliether Five tirassy slope and tuave hiht

After that Miki began exploring along the foot of the slope, and for a scant hundred yards Neewa hu, but beyond that point he flatly refused to go In the fourthlife Neeas satisfied that Nature had given hi his sto In the next fewjob on his hands if he kept up the record of his fa the fat and juicy carcass of the young bull filled hiht of play and started back up the slope on athis, Miki gave up his idea of exploration and joined him

They reached the shelf of the dip twenty yards fro stones looked forth upon their antic oere tearing at the carcass To Miki and Neewa these were the monsters of the black forest out of which they had escaped so narroith their lives But as a ht-seeing pirates They were Snols, 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 ht of theh 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 hiiant hunter that was his father rose in hiain like fire The carcass was his ht for it Besides, had he not whipped the big owl in the forest? But here there were two The fact held hier, and in that brief space the unexpected happened

Slinking up out of the loth 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 eful 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 round still closer

Deep into Mispoon's four-inch ars Taken at a disadvantage Mispoon's head would have been torn froathered hi her blood stained head froun with a throaty, wheezing screa 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 froony that came out of her may have held the death-note for Mispoon, her s, poised himself for an instant, and launched hiun 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 hisout of the hole in her side, but with the di 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 shea 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 gri comprehension of the world as it existed for theettable wisdoe-old instinct and the heredity of breed

They had killed ss and his buht for their lives; they had passed through experiences that, froale such as they had seen with their own eyes to open up the doors that gave them a nepoint 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 excitereater understanding a new craft and a new cunning were born in hiht him the priceless value of silence and of caution, for he kne that in the world there were s that would not run away froed creatures; he had learned that the earth was not made for hiht 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