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