Challoner stood dumbfounded.  In another moment he would have separated the little fighters, but something happened that stopped him.  Neewa, standing squarely over Miki, with Miki’s four over-grown paws held aloft as if signalling an unqualified surrender, slowly drew his teeth from the pup’s loose hide.  Again he saw the man-beast.  Instinct, keener than a clumsy reasoning, held him for a few moments without movement, his beady eyes on Challoner.  In midair Miki wagged his paws; he whined softly; his hard tail thumped the ground as he pleaded for mercy, and he licked his chops and tried to wriggle, as if to tell Neewa that he had no intention at all to do him harm.  Neewa, facing Challoner, snarled defiantly.  He drew himself slowly from over Miki.  And Miki, afraid to move, still lay on his back with his paws in the air.

Very slowly, a look of wonder in his face, Challoner drew back into the tent and peered through a rent in the canvas.

The snarl left Neewa’s face.  He looked at the pup.  Perhaps away back in some corner of his brain the heritage of instinct was telling him of what he had lost because of brothers and sisters unborn—­the comradeship of babyhood, the play of children.  And Miki must have sensed the change in the furry little black creature who a moment ago was his enemy.  His tail thumped almost frantically, and he swung out his front paws toward Neewa.  Then, a little fearful of what might happen, he rolled on his side.  Still Neewa did not move.  Joyously Miki wriggled.

A moment later, looking through the slit in the canvas, Challoner saw them cautiously smelling noses.

CHAPTER FOUR

That night came a cold and drizzling rain from out of the north and the east.  In the wet dawn Challoner came out to start a fire, and in a hollow under a spruce root he found Miki and Neewa cuddled together, sound asleep.

It was the cub who first saw the man-beast, and for a brief space before the pup roused himself Neewa’s shining eyes were fixed on the strange enemy who had so utterly changed his world for him.  Exhaustion had made him sleep through the long hours of that first night of captivity, and in sleep he had forgotten many things.  But now it all came back to him as he cringed deeper into his shelter under the root, and so softly that only Miki heard him he whimpered for his mother.

It was the whimper that roused Miki.  Slowly he untangled himself from the ball into which he had rolled, stretched his long and overgrown legs, and yawned so loudly that the sound reached Challoner’s ears.  The man turned and saw two pairs of eyes fixed upon him from the sheltered hollow under the root.  The pup’s one good ear and the other that was half gone stood up alertly, as he greeted his master with the boundless good cheer of an irrepressible comradeship.  Challoner’s face, wet with the drizzle of the gray skies and bronzed by the wind and storm of fourteen months in the northland, lighted up with a responsive grin, and Miki wriggled forth weaving and twisting himself into grotesque contortions expressive of happiness at being thus directly smiled at by his master.