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.