f 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.

With the coming of dawn he tried once more to awaken Neewa. But this
time he was not so insistent. Nor did he have the desire to nip Neewa
with his teeth. Something had happened--something which he could not
understand. He sensed the thing, but he could not reason it. And he was
filled with a strange and foreboding fear.

He went down again to hunt. Under the glory of th