Neewa could stand no more.  Blind with rage, he darted in.  It was chance that closed his vicious little jaws on a toe that belonged to Makoos, and his teeth sank into the flesh like two rows of ivory needles.  Makoos gave a tug, but Neewa held on, and bit deeper.  Then Makoos drew up his leg and sent it out like a catapault, and in spite of his determination to hang on Neewa found himself sailing wildly through the air.  He landed against a rock twenty feet from the fighters with a force that knocked the wind out of him, and for a matter of eight or ten seconds after that he wobbled dizzily in his efforts to stand up.  Then his vision and his senses returned and he gazed on a scene that brought all the blood pounding back into his body again.

Makoos was no longer fighting, but was running away—­and there was a decided limp in his gait!

Poor old Noozak was standing on her feet, facing the retreating enemy.  She was panting like a winded calf.  Her jaws were agape.  Her tongue lolled out, and blood was dripping in little trickles from her body to the ground.  She had been thoroughly and efficiently mauled.  She was beyond the shadow of a doubt a whipped bear.  Yet in that glorious flight of the enemy Neewa saw nothing of Noozak’s defeat.  Their enemy was running away!  Therefore, he was whipped.  And with excited little squeaks of joy Neewa ran to his mother.

CHAPTER THREE

As they stood in the warm sunshine of this first day of June, watching the last of Makoos as he fled across the creek bottom, Neewa felt very much like an old and seasoned warrior instead of a pot-bellied, round-faced cub of four months who weighed nine pounds and not four hundred.

It was many minutes after Neewa had sunk his ferocious little teeth deep into the tenderest part of the old he-bear’s toe before Noozak could get her wind sufficiently to grunt.  Her sides were pumping like a pair of bellows, and after Makoos had disappeared beyond the creek Neewa sat down on his chubby bottom, perked his funny ears forward, and eyed his mother with round and glistening eyes that were filled with uneasy speculation.  With a wheezing groan Noozak turned and made her way slowly toward the big rock alongside which she had been sleeping when Neewa’s fearful cries for help had awakened her.  Every bone in her aged body seemed broken or dislocated.  She limped and sagged and moaned as she walked, and behind her were left little red trails of blood in the green grass.  Makoos had given her a fine pummeling.

She lay down, gave a final groan, and looked at Neewa, as if to say: 

“If you hadn’t gone off on some deviltry and upset that old viper’s temper this wouldn’t have happened.  And now—­look at me!”