Meanwhile Neewa and Miki went at their breakfast as if starved.  They were immensely practical.  They did not look back on what had happened, but for the moment submerged themselves completely in the present.  The few days of thrill and adventure through which they had gone seemed like a year.  Neewa’s yearning for his mother had grown less and less insistent, and Miki’s lost master counted for nothing now, as things were going with him.  Last night was the big, vivid thing in their memories—­their fight for life with the monster owls, their flight, the killing of the young caribou bull by the wolves, and (with Miki) the short, bitter experience with Maheegun, the renegade she-wolf.  His shoulder burned where she had torn at him with her teeth.  But this did not lessen his appetite.  Growling as he ate, he filled himself until he could hold no more.

Then he sat back on his haunches and looked in the direction Maheegun had taken.

It was eastward, toward Hudson Bay, over a great plain that lay between two ridges that were like forest walls, yellow and gold in the morning sun.  He had never seen the world as it looked to him now.  The wolves had overtaken the caribou on a scarp on the high ground that thrust itself out like a short fat thumb from the black and owl-infested forest, and the carcass lay in a meadowy dip that overhung the plain.  From the edge of this dip Miki could look down—­and so far away that the wonder of what he saw dissolved itself at last into the shimmer of the sun and the blue of the sky.  Within his vision lay a paradise of marvellous promise; wide stretches of soft, green meadow; clumps of timber, park-like until they merged into the deeper forest that began with the farther ridge; great patches of bush radiant with the colouring of June; here and there the gleam of water, and half a mile away a lake that was like a giant mirror set in a purplish-green frame of balsam and spruce.

Into these things Maheegun, the she-wolf, had gone.  He wondered whether she would come back.  He sniffed the air for her.  But there was no longer the mother-yearning in his heart.  Something had already begun to tell him of the vast difference between the dog and the wolf.  For a few moments, still hopeful that the world held a mother for him, he had mistaken her for the one he had lost.  But he understood now.  A little more and Maheegun’s teeth would have snapped his shoulder, or slashed his throat to the jugular.  TEBAH-gone-GAWIN (the One Great Law) was impinging itself upon him, the implacable law of the survival of the fittest.  To live was to fight—­to kill; to beat everything that had feet or wings.  The earth and the air held menace for him.  Nowhere, since he had lost Challoner, had he found friendship except in the heart of Neewa, the motherless cub.  And he turned toward Neewa now, growling at a gay-plumaged moose-bird that was hovering about for a morsel of meat.