now, and never had his blood burned with a wilder exultation.  He whined, and ran back to Neewa.  He barked in the gloom of the cavern and gave his comrade a nudge with his nose.  Neewa grunted sleepily.  He stretched himself, raised his head for an instant, and then curled himself into a ball again.  Vainly Miki protested that it was day, and time for them to be moving.  Neewa made no response, and after a while Miki returned to the mouth of the cavern, and looked back to see if Neewa was following him.  Then, disappointed, he went out into the snow.  For an hour he did not move farther than ten feet away from the den.  Three times he returned to Neewa and urged him to get up and come out where it was light.  In that far corner of the cavern it was dark, and it was as if he were trying to tell Neewa that he was a dunce to lie there still thinking it was night when the sun was up outside.  But he failed.  Neewa was in the edge of his Long Sleep—­the beginning of USKE-pow-A-Mew, the dream land of the bears.

Annoyance, the desire almost to sink his teeth in Neewa’s ear, gave place slowly to another thing in Miki.  The instinct that between beasts is like the spoken reason of men stirred in a strange and disquieting way within him.  He became more and more uneasy.  There was almost distress in his restlessness as he hovered about the mouth of the cavern.  A last time he went to Neewa, and then he started alone down into the valley.

He was hungry, but on this first day after the storm there was small chance of him finding anything to eat.  The snowshoe rabbits were completely buried under their windfalls and shelters, and lay quietly in their warm nests.  Nothing had moved during the hours of the storm.  There were no trails of living things for him to follow, and in places he sank to his shoulders in the soft snow.  He made his way to the creek.  It was no longer the creek he had known.  It was edged with ice.  There was something dark and brooding about it now.  The sound it made was no longer the rippling song of summer and golden autumn.  There was a threat in its gurgling monotone—­a new voice, as if a black and forbidding spirit had taken possession of it and was warning him that the times had changed, and that new laws and a new force had come to claim sovereignty in the land of his birth.

He drank of the water cautiously.  It was cold—­ice-cold.  Slowly it was being impinged upon him that in the beauty of this new world that was his there was no longer the warm and pulsing beat of the heart that was life.  He was alone.  Alone!  Everything else was covered up; everything else seemed dead.

He went back to Neewa and lay close to him all through the day.  And through the night that followed he did not move again from the cavern.  He went only as far as the door and saw celestial spaces ablaze with stars and a moon that rode up into the heavens like a white sun.  They, too, seemed no longer like the moon and stars he had known.  They were terribly still and cold.  And under them the earth was terribly white and silent.