Just what happened in the one minute that followed his assault Miki would never be able quite to understand.  It was not in reality a fight; it was a one-sided immolation, a massacre.  His first impression was that he had tackled a dozen Oochaks instead of one.  Beyond that first impression his mind did not work, nor did his eyes visualize.  He was whipped as he would never be whipped again in his life.  He was cut and bruised and bitten; he was strangled and stabbed; he was so utterly mauled that for a space after Oochak had gone he continued to rake the air with his paws, unconscious of the fact that the affair was over.  When he opened his eyes, and found himself alone, he slunk into the hollow log where he had cornered the rabbit.

In there he lay a good half hour, trying hard to comprehend just what had happened.  The sun was setting when he dragged himself out.  He limped.  His one good ear was bitten clean through.  There were bare spots on his hide where Oochak had scraped the hair off.  His bones ached, his throat was sore, and there was a lump over one eye.  He looked longingly back over the “home” trail.  Up there was Neewa.  With the lengthening shadows of the day’s end a great loneliness crept upon him and a desire to turn back to his comrade.  But Oochak had gone that way—­and he did not want to meet Oochak again.

He wandered a little farther south and east, perhaps a quarter of a mile, before the sun disappeared entirely.  In the thickening gloom of twilight he struck the Big Rock portage between the Beaver and the Loon.

It was not a trail.  Only at rare intervals did wandering voyageurs coming down from the north make use of it in their passage from one waterway to the other.  Three or four times a year at the most would a wolf have caught the scent of man in it.  It was there tonight, so fresh that Miki stopped when he came to it as if another Oochak had risen before him.  For a space he was turned into the rigidity of rock by a single overwhelming emotion.  All other things were forgotten in the fact that he had struck the trail of a man—­and, therefore, the trail of Challoner, his master.  He began to follow it—­slowly at first, as if fearing that it might get away from him.  Darkness came, and he was still following it.  In the light of the stars he persisted, all else crowded from him but the homing instinct of the dog and the desire for a master.

At last he came almost to the shore of the Loon, and there he saw the campfire of Makoki and the white man.

He did not rush in.  He did not bark or yelp; the hard schooling of the wilderness had already set its mark upon him.  He slunk in cautiously—­then stopped, flat on his belly, just outside the rim of firelight.  Then he saw that neither of the men was Challoner.  But both were smoking, as Challoner had smoked.  He could hear their voices, and they were like Challoner’s voice.  And the camp was the same—­a fire, a pot hanging over it, a tent, and in the air the odours of recently cooked things.