Like a flash the she-wolf turned, her fangs bared the length of her jaws and her bloodshot eyes aglow with menace and suspicion.  Miki had no time to make a move or another sound.  With the suddenness of a cat the outcast creature was upon him.  Her fangs slashed him just once—­and she was gone.  Her teeth had drawn blood from his shoulder, but it was not the smart of the wound that held him for many moments as still as if dead.  The Mother-smell was still where Maheegun had been.  But his dreams had crumbled.  The thing that had been Memory died away at last in a deep breath that was broken by a whimper of pain.  For him, even as for Neewa, there was no more a Challoner, and no longer a mother.  But there remained—­the world!  In it the sun was rising.  Out of it came the thrill and the perfume of life.  And close to him—­very close—­was the rich, sweet smell of meat.

He sniffed hungrily.  Then he turned, and saw Neewa’s black and pudgy body tumbling down the slope of the dip to join him in the feast.

CHAPTER NINE

Had Makoki, the leather-faced old Cree runner between God’s Lake and Fort Churchill, known the history of Miki and Neewa up to the point where they came to feast on the fat and partly devoured carcass of the young caribou bull, he would have said that Iskoo Wapoo, the Good Spirit of the beasts, was watching over them most carefully.  For Makoki had great faith in the forest gods as well as in those of his own tepee.  He would have given the story his own picturesque version, and would have told it to the little children of his son’s children; and his son’s children would have kept it in their memory for their own children later on.

It was not in the ordained nature of things that a black bear cub and a Mackenzie hound pup with a dash of Airedale and Spitz in him should “chum up” together as Neewa and Miki had done.  Therefore, he would have said, the Beneficent Spirit who watched over the affairs of four-legged beasts must have had an eye on them from the beginning.  It was she—­Iskoo Wapoo was a goddess and not a god —­who had made Challoner kill Neewa’s mother, the big black bear; and it was she who had induced him to tie the pup and the cub together on the same piece of rope, so that when they fell out of the white man’s canoe into the rapids they would not die, but would be company and salvation for each other.  NESWA-PAWUK ("two little brothers”) Makoki would have called them; and had it come to the test he would have cut off a finger before harming either of them.  But Makoki knew nothing of their adventures, and on this morning when they came down to the feast he was a hundred miles away, haggling with a white man who wanted a guide.  He would never know that Iskoo Wapoo was at his side that very moment, planning the thing that was to mean so much in the lives of Neewa and Miki.