Deep into her loins the great owl sank his talons, gripping at the renegade’s vitals with an avenging and ferocious tenacity.  In that hold Maheegun felt the sting of death.  She flung herself on her back; she rolled over and over, snarling and snapping and clawing the air in her efforts to free herself of the burning knives that were sinking still deeper into her bowels.  Mispoon hung on, rolling as she rolled, beating with his giant wings, fastening his talons in that clutch that death could not shake loose.  On the ground his mate was dying.  Her life’s blood was pouring out of the hole in her side, but with the dimming vision of death she made a last effort to help Mispoon.  And Mispoon, a hero to the last, kept his grip until he was dead.

Into the edge of the bush Maheegun dragged herself.  There she freed herself of the big owl.  But the deep wounds were still in her sides.  The blood dripped from her belly as she made her way down into the thicker cover, leaving a red trail behind her.  A quarter of a mile away she lay down under a clump of dwarf spruce; and there, a little later, she died.

To Neewa and Miki—­and especially to the son of Hela—­the grim combat had widened even more that subtle and growing comprehension of the world as it existed for them.  It was the unforgettable wisdom of experience backed by an age-old instinct and the heredity of breed.  They had killed small things—­Neewa, his bugs and his frogs and his bumble-bees; Miki, his rabbit—­they had fought for their lives; they had passed through experiences that, from the beginning, had been a gamble with death; but it had needed the climax of a struggle such as they had seen with their own eyes to open up the doors that gave them a new viewpoint of life.

It was many minutes before Miki went forth and smelled of Newish, the dead owl.  He had no desire now to tear at her feathers in the excitement of an infantile triumph and ferocity.  Along with greater understanding a new craft and a new cunning were born in him.  The fate of Mispoon and his mate had taught him the priceless value of silence and of caution, for he knew now that in the world there were many things that were not afraid of him, and many things that would not run away from him.  He had lost his fearless and blatant contempt for winged creatures; he had learned that the earth was not made for him alone, and that to hold his small place on it he must fight as Maheegun and the owls had fought.  This was because in Miki’s veins was the red fighting blood of a long line of ancestors that reached back to the wolves.

In Neewa the process of deduction was vastly different.  His breed was not the fighting breed, except as it fought among its own kind.  It did not make a habit of preying upon other beasts, and no other beast preyed upon it.  This was purely an accident of birth—­ the fact that no other creature in all his wide domain was powerful enough, either alone or in groups, to defeat a grown black bear in open battle.  Therefore Neewa learned nothing of fighting in the tragedy of Maheegun and the owls.  His profit, if any, was in a greater caution.  And his chief interest was in the fact that Maheegun and the two owls had not devoured the young bull.  His supper was still safe.