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!