it. That night, for the first time,
Miki could not sleep with him.

The seventh day brought the climax. Ahtik now fairly smelled to heaven.
The odour of him drifted up and away on the soft June wind until all
the crows in the country were gathering. It drove Miki, slinking like a
whipped cur, down into the creek bottom. When Neewa came down for a
drink after his morning feast Miki sniffed him over for a moment and
then slunk away from him again. As a matter of fact, there was small
difference between Ahtik and Neewa now, except that one lay still and
the other moved. Both smelled dead; both were decidedly "well hung."
Even the crows circled over Neewa, wondering why it was that he walked
about like a living thing.

That night Miki slept alone under a clump of bush in the creek bottom.
He was hungry and lonely, and for the first time in many days he felt
the bigness and emptiness of the world. He wanted Neewa. He whined for
him in the starry silence of the long hours between sunset and dawn.
The sun was well up before Neewa came down the hill. He had finished
his breakfast and his morning roll, and he was worse than ever. Again
Miki tried to coax him away but Neewa was disgustingly fixed in his
determination to remain in his present glory. And this morning he was
more than usually anxious to return to the dip. All of yesterday he had
found it necessary to frighten the crows away from his meat, and to-day
they were doubly persistent in their efforts to rob him. With a grunt
and a squeal to Miki he hustled back up the hill after he had taken his
drink.

His trail entered the dip through the pile of rocks from which Miki and
he had watched the battle between Maheegun and the two owls, and as a
matter of caution he always paused for a few moments among these rocks
to make sure that all was well in the open. This morning he received a
decided shock. Ahtik's carcass was literally black with crows. Kakakew
and his Ethiopic horde of scavengers had descended in a cloud, and they
were tearing and fighting and beating their wings about Ahtik as if all
of them had gone mad. Another cloud was hovering in air; every bush and
near-by sapling was bending under the weight of them, and in the sun
their jet-black plumage glistened as if they had just come out of the
bath of a tinker's pot. Neewa stood astounded. He was not frightened;
he had driven the cowardly robbers away many times. But never had there
been so many of them. He could