ot this fact that thrilled him until
his heart stood still. From out of the bushy plain had come Maheegun, a
renegade she-wolf, to fill herself of the meat which she had not helped
to kill. She was a slinking, hollow-backed, quick-fanged creature,
still rib-thin from the sickness that had come of eating a poison-bait;
a beast shunned by her own kind--a coward, a murderess even of her own
whelps. But she was none of these things to Miki. In her he saw in
living flesh and bone what his memory and his instinct recalled to him
of his mother. And his mother had come before Challoner, his master.

For a minute or two he lay trembling, and then he went down, as he
would have gone to Challoner; with great caution, with a wilder
suspense, but with a strange yearning within him that the man's
presence would have failed to rouse. He was very close to Maheegun
before she was conscious that he was near. The Mother-smell was warm in
his nose now; it filled him with a great joy; and yet--he was afraid.
But it was not a physical fear. Flattened on the ground, with his head
between his fore-paws, he whined.

Like a flash the she-wolf turned, her fangs bared the length of her
jaws and her bloodshot eyes aglow with menace and suspicion. Miki had
no time to make a move or another sound. With the suddenness of a cat
the outcast creature was upon him. Her fangs slashed him just once--and
she was gone. Her teeth had drawn blood from his shoulder, but it was
not the smart of the wound that held him for many moments as still as
if dead. The Mother-smell was still where Maheegun had been. But his
dreams had crumbled. The thing that had been Memory died away at last
in a deep breath that was broken by a whimper of pain. For him, even as
for Neewa, there was no more a Challoner, and no longer a mother. But
there remained--the world! In it the sun was rising. Out of it came the
thrill and the perfume of life. And close to him--very close--was the
rich, sweet smell of meat.

He sniffed hungrily. Then he turned, and saw Neewa's black and pudgy
body tumbling down the slope of the dip to join him in the feast.

CHAPTER NINE

Had Makoki, the leather-faced old Cree runner between God's Lake and
Fort Churchill, known the history of Miki and Neewa up to the point
where they came to feast on the fat and partly devoured carcass of the
young caribou bull, he would have said that Iskoo Wapoo, the Good
Spirit of the beasts, was watching over them m