Through six glorious and sun-filled weeks of late summer and early autumn—­until the middle of September—­Miki and Neewa ranged the country westward, always heading toward the setting sun, the country of Jackson’s Knee, of the Touchwood and the Clearwater, and God’s Lake.  In this country they saw many things.  It was a region a hundred miles square which the handiwork of Nature had made into a veritable kingdom of the wild.  They came upon great beaver colonies in the dark and silent places; they watched the otter at play; they came upon moose and caribou so frequently that they no longer feared or evaded them, but walked out openly into the meadows or down to the edge of the swamps where they were feeding.  It was here that Miki learned the great lesson that claw and fang were made to prey upon cloven hoof and horn, for the wolves were thick, and a dozen times they came upon their kills, and even more frequently heard the wild tongue of the hunting-packs.  Since his experience with Maheegun he no longer had the desire to join them.  And now Neewa no longer insisted on remaining near meat when they found it.  It was the beginning of the KWASKA-Hao in Neewa—­the instinctive sensing of the Big Change.

Until early in October Miki could see but little of this change in his comrade.  It was then that Neewa became more and more restless, and this restlessness grew as the chill nights came, and autumn breathed more heavily in the air.  It was Neewa who took the lead in their peregrinations now, and he seemed always to be questing for something—­a mysterious something which Miki could neither smell nor see.  He no longer slept for hours at a time.  By mid-October he slept scarcely at all, but roved through most of the hours of night as well as day, eating, eating, eating, and always smelling the wind for that elusive thing which Nature was commanding him to seek and find.  Ceaselessly he was nosing under windfalls and among the rocks, and Miki was always near him, always on the QUI vive for battle with the thing that Neewa was hunting out.  And it seemed to be never found.

Then Neewa turned back to the east, drawn by the instinct of his forefathers; back toward the country of Noozak, his mother, and of Soominitik, his father; and Miki followed.  The nights grew more and more chill.  The stars seemed farther away, and no longer was the forest moon red like blood.  The cry of the loon had a moaning note in it, a note of grief and lamentation.  And in their shacks and tepees the forest people sniffed the air of frosty mornings, and soaked their traps in fish-oil and beaver-grease, and made their moccasins, and mended snow-shoe and sledge, for the cry of the loon said that winter was creeping down out of the North.  And the swamps grew silent.  The cow moose no longer mooed to her young.  In place of it, from the open plain and “burn” rose the defiant challenge of bull to bull and the deadly clash of horn against horn under the stars of night.  The wolf no longer howled to hear his voice.  In the travel of padded feet there came to be a slinking, hunting caution.  In all the forest world blood was running red again.