Crawling into the windfall after him Miki turned and poked out his head.  He was not satisfied.  His lips were still drawn back, and he continued to growl.  He had beaten his enemy.  He had knocked it over fairly, and had filled his jaws with its feathers.  In the face of that triumph he sensed the fact that he had run away in following Neewa, and he was possessed with the desire to go back and have it out to a finish.  It was the blood of the Airedale and the Spitz growing stronger in him, fearless of defeat; the blood of his father, the giant hunting-hound Hela.  It was the demand of his breed, with its mixture of wolfish courage and fox-like persistency backed by the powerful jaws and Herculean strength of the Mackenzie hound, and if Neewa had not drawn deeper under the windfall he would have gone out again and yelped his challenge to the feathered things from which they had fled.

Neewa was smarting under the red-hot stab of Oohoomisew’s talons, and he wanted no more of the fight that came out of the air.  He began licking his wounds, and after a while Miki went back to him and smelled of the fresh, warm blood.  It made him growl.  He knew that it was Neewa’s blood, and his eyes glowed like twin balls of fire as they watched the opening through which they had entered into the dark tangle of fallen trees.

For an hour he did not move, and in that hour, as in the hour after the killing of the rabbit, he grew.  When at last he crept out cautiously from under the windfall the sun was sinking behind the western forests.  He peered about him, watching for movement and listening for sound.  The sagging and apologetic posture of puppyhood was gone from him.  His overgrown feet stood squarely on the ground; his angular legs were as hard as if carven out of knotty wood; his body was tense, his ears stood up, his head was rigidly set between the bony shoulders that already gave evidence of gigantic strength to come.  About him he knew was the Big Adventure.  The world was no longer a world of play and of snuggling under the hands of a master.  Something vastly more thrilling had come into it now.

After a time he dropped on his belly close to the opening under the windfall and began chewing at the end of rope which dragged from about his neck.  The sun sank lower.  It disappeared.  Still he waited for Neewa to come out and lie with him in the open.  As the twilight thickened into deeper gloom he drew himself into the edge of the door under the windfall and found Neewa there.  Together they peered forth into the mysterious night.

For a time there was the utter stillness of the first hour of darkness in the northland.  Up in the clear sky the stars came out in twos and then in glowing constellations.  There was an early moon.  It was already over the edge of the forests, flooding the world with a golden glow, and in that glow the night was filled with grotesque black shadows that had neither movement nor sound.  Then the silence