And Noozak—­so old that she had lost half her teeth, so old that her bones ached on damp and chilly nights, and her eyesight was growing dim—­was still not so old that she did not look down with growing exultation upon what she saw.  Her mind was travelling beyond the mere valley in which they had wakened.  Off there beyond the walls of forest, beyond the farthest lake, beyond the river and the plain, were the illimitable spaces which gave her home.  To her came dully a sound uncaught by Neewa—­the almost unintelligible rumble of the great waterfall.  It was this, and the murmur of a thousand trickles of running water, and the soft wind breathing down in the balsam and spruce that put the music of spring into the air.

At last Noozak heaved a great breath out of her lungs and with a grunt to Neewa began to lead the way slowly down among the rocks to the foot of the ridge.

In the golden pool of the valley it was even warmer than on the crest of the ridge.  Noozak went straight to the edge of the slough.  Half a dozen rice birds rose with a whir of wings that made Neewa almost upset himself.  Noozak paid no attention to them.  A loon let out a squawky protest at Noozak’s soft-footed appearance, and followed it up with a raucous screech that raised the hair on Neewa’s spine.  And Noozak paid no attention to this.  Neewa observed these things.  His eye was on her, and instinct had already winged his legs with the readiness to run if his mother should give the signal.  In his funny little head it was developing very quickly that his mother was a most wonderful creature.  She was by all odds the biggest thing alive—­that is, the biggest that stood on legs, and moved.  He was confident of this for a space of perhaps two minutes, when they came to the end of the fen.  And here was a sudden snort, a crashing of bracken, the floundering of a huge body through knee-deep mud, and a monstrous bull moose, four times as big as Noozak, set off in lively flight.  Neewa’s eyes all but popped from his head.  And still Noozak paid no attention!

It was then that Neewa crinkled up his tiny nose and snarled, just as he had snarled at Noozak’s ears and hair and at sticks he had worried in the black cavern.  A glorious understanding dawned upon him.  He could snarl at anything he wanted to snarl at, no matter how big.  For everything ran away from Noozak his mother.

All through this first glorious day Neewa was discovering things, and with each hour it was more and more impressed upon him that his mother was the unchallenged mistress of all this new and sunlit domain.