A few minutes before, Neewa had weighed a dozen pounds; now he weighed fourteen or fifteen.  His stomach was puffed out like the sides of an overfilled bag, and he sat humped up in a pool of warm sunshine licking his chops and vastly contented with himself and the world.  Miki rubbed up to him, and Neewa gave a chummy grunt.  Then he rolled over on his fat back and invited Miki to play.  It was the first time; and with a joyous yelp Miki jumped into him.  Scratching and biting and kicking, and interjecting their friendly scrimmage with ferocious growling on Miki’s part and pig-like grunts and squeals on Neewa’s, they rolled to the edge of the dip.  It was a good hundred feet to the bottom—­a steep, grassy slope that ran to the plain—­and like two balls they catapulted the length of it.  For Neewa it was not so bad.  He was round and fat, and went easily.

With Miki it was different.  He was all legs and skin and angular bone, and he went down twisting and somersaulting and tying himself into knots until by the time he struck the hard strip of shale at the edge of the plain he was drunk with dizziness and the breath was out of his body.  He staggered to his feet with a gasp.  For a space the world was whirling round and round in a sickening circle.  Then he pulled himself together, and made out Neewa a dozen feet away.

Neewa was just awakening to the truth of an exhilarating discovery.  Next to a boy on a sled, or a beaver on its tail, no one enjoys a “slide” more than a black bear cub, and as Miki rearranged his scattered wits Neewa climbed twenty or thirty feet up the slope and deliberately rolled down again!  Miki’s jaws fell apart in amazement.  Again Neewa climbed up and rolled down—­and Miki ceased to breathe altogether.  Five times he watched Neewa go that twenty or thirty feet up the grassy slope and tumble down.  The fifth time he waded into Neewa and gave him a rough-and-tumble that almost ended in a fight.

After that Miki began exploring along the foot of the slope, and for a scant hundred yards Neewa humoured him by following, but beyond that point he flatly refused to go.  In the fourth month of his exciting young life Neewa was satisfied that Nature had given him birth that he might have the endless pleasure of filling his stomach.  For him, eating was the one and only excuse for existing.  In the next few months he had a big job on his hands if he kept up the record of his family, and the fact that Miki was apparently abandoning the fat and juicy carcass of the young bull filled him with alarm and rebellion.  Straightway he forgot all thought of play and started back up the slope on a mission that was 100 per cent. business.