drag the pup with him. So Neewa tugged at the end of his rope,
digging his sharp little claws into the driftwood, and as he advanced
Miki was dragged up head foremost out of the cold and friendless
stream. It was a simple process. Neewa reached a log around which the
water was eddying, and there he flattened himself down and hung on as
he had never hung to anything else in his life. The log was entirely
hidden from shore by a dense growth of brushwood. Otherwise, ten
minutes later Challoner would have seen them.

As it was, Miki had not sufficiently recovered either to smell or hear
his master when Challoner came to see if there was a possibility of his
small comrade being alive. And Neewa only hugged the log more tightly.
He had seen enough of the man-beast to last him for the remainder of
his life. It was half an hour before Miki began to gasp, and cough, and
gulp up water, and for the first time since their scrap in the canoe
the cub began to take a live interest in him. In another ten minutes
Miki raised his head and looked about him. At that Neewa gave a tug on
the rope, as if to advise him that it was time to get busy if they were
expected to reach shore. And Miki, drenched and forlorn, resembling
more a starved bone than a thing of skin and flesh, actually made an
effort to wag his tail when he saw Neewa.

He was still in a couple of inches of water, and with a hopeful eye on
the log upon which Neewa was squatted he began to work his wobbly legs
toward it. It was a high log, and a dry log, and when Miki reached it
his unlucky star was with him again. Cumbrously he sprawled himself
against it, and as he scrambled and scraped with his four awkward legs
to get up alongside Neewa he gave to the log the slight push which it
needed to set it free of the sunken driftage. Slowly at first the
eddying current carried one end of the log away from its pier. Then the
edge of the main current caught at it, viciously--and so suddenly that
Miki almost lost his precarious footing, the log gave a twist, righted
itself, and began, to scud down stream at a speed that would have made
Challoner hug his breath had he been in their position with his
faithful canoe.

In fact, Challoner was at this very moment portaging the rapids below
the waterfall. To have set his canoe in them where Miki and Neewa were
gloriously sailing he would have considered an inexcusable hazard, and
as a matter of safety he was losing the better part of a coup