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.