must at first have meant that Nature should be.  A new generation of wild things had been born.  It was a season of Youth, with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of little children of the wild playing their first play, learning their first lessons, growing up swiftly to face the menace and doom of their first winter.  And the Beneficent Spirit of the forests, anticipating what was to come, had prepared well for them.  Everywhere there was plenty.  The blueberries, the blackberries, the mountain-ash and the saskatoons were ripe; tree and vine were bent low with their burden of fruit.  The grass was green and tender from the summer rains.  Bulbous roots were fairly popping out of the earth; the fens and the edges of the lakes were rich with things to eat, overhead and underfoot the horn of plenty was emptying itself without stint.

In this world Neewa and Miki found a vast and unending contentment.  They lay, on this August afternoon, on a sun-bathed shelf of rock that overlooked a wonderful valley.  Neewa, stuffed with luscious blueberries, was asleep.  Miki’s eyes were only partly closed as he looked down into the soft haze of the valley.  Up to him came the rippling music of the stream running between the rocks and over the pebbly bars below, and with it the soft and languorous drone of the valley itself.  He napped uneasily for half an hour, and then his eyes opened and he was wide awake.  He took a sharp look over the valley.  Then he looked at Neewa, who, fat and lazy, would have slept until dark.  It was always Miki who kept him on the move.  And now Miki barked at him gruffly two or three times, and nipped at one of his ears.

“Wake up!” he might have said.  “What’s the sense of sleeping on a day like this?  Let’s go down along the creek and hunt something.”

Neewa roused himself, stretched his fat body, and yawned.  Sleepily his little eyes took in the valley.  Miki got up and gave the low and anxious whine which always told his companion that he wanted to be on the move.  Neewa responded, and they began making their way down the green slope into the rich bottom between the two ridges.

They were now almost six months of age, and in the matter of size had nearly ceased to be a cub and a pup.  They were almost a dog and a bear.  Miki’s angular legs were getting their shape; his chest had filled out; his neck had grown until it no longer seemed too small for his big head and jaws, and his body had increased in girth and length until he was twice as big as most ordinary dogs of his age.

Neewa had lost his round, ball-like cubbishness, though he still betrayed far more than Miki the fact that he was not many months lost from his mother.  But he was no longer filled with that wholesome love of peace that had filled his earlier cubhood.  The blood of Soominitik was at last beginning to assert itself, and he no longer sought a place of safety in time of battle—­unless the grimness of