nd hunt something."

Neewa roused himself, stretched his fat body, and yawned. Sleepily his
little eyes took in the valley. Miki got up and gave the low and
anxious whine which always told his companion that he wanted to be on
the move. Neewa responded, and they began making their way down the
green slope into the rich bottom between the two ridges.

They were now almost six months of age, and in the matter of size had
nearly ceased to be a cub and a pup. They were almost a dog and a bear.
Miki's angular legs were getting their shape; his chest had filled out;
his neck had grown until it no longer seemed too small for his big head
and jaws, and his body had increased in girth and length until he was
twice as big as most ordinary dogs of his age.

Neewa had lost his round, ball-like cubbishness, though he still
betrayed far more than Miki the fact that he was not many months lost
from his mother. But he was no longer filled with that wholesome love
of peace that had filled his earlier cubhood. The blood of Soominitik
was at last beginning to assert itself, and he no longer sought a place
of safety in time of battle--unless the grimness of utter necessity
made it unavoidable. In fact, unlike most bears, he loved a fight. If
there were a stronger term at hand it might be applied to Miki, the
true son of Hela. Youthful as they were, they were already covered with
scars that would have made a veteran proud. Crows and owls, wolf-fang
and fisher-claw had all left their marks, and on Miki's side was a bare
space eight inches long left as a souvenir by a wolverine.

In Neewa's funny round head there had grown, during the course of
events, an ambition to have it out some day with a citizen of his own
kind; but the two opportunities that had come his way were spoiled by
the fact that the other cubs' mothers were with them. So now, when Miki
led off on his trips of adventure, Neewa always followed with another
thrill than that of getting something to eat, which so long had been
his one ambition. Which is not to say that Neewa had lost his appetite.
He could eat more in one day than Miki could eat in three, mainly
because Miki was satisfied with two or three meals a day while Neewa
preferred one--a continuous one lasting from dawn until dark. On the
trail he was always eating something.

A quarter of a mile along the foot of the ridge, in a stony coulee down
which a tiny rivulet trickled, there grew the finest wild currants in