Smothered under Pete’s heavier body Neewa began to realize, at the end of those three or four minutes, that he had tackled more than was good for him.  It was altogether Pete’s size and not his fighting qualities, for Neewa had him outpointed there.  But he fought on, hoping for some good turn of luck, until at last Pete got him just where he wanted him and began raking him up and down his sides until in another three minutes he would have been half skinned if Miki hadn’t judged the moment ripe for intervention.  Even then Neewa was taking his punishment without a howl.

In another instant Miki had Pete by the ear.  It was a grim and terrible hold.  Old Soominitik himself would have bawled lustily in the circumstances.  Pete raised his voice in a howl of agony.  He forgot everything else but the terror and the pain of this new something that had him by the ear, and he rent the air with his outcry.  His lamentation poured in an unbroken spasm of sound from his throat.  Neewa knew that Miki was in action.

He pulled himself from under the young interloper’s body—­and not a second too soon.  Down the coulee, charging like a mad bull, came Pete’s mother.  Neewa was off like a shot just as she made a powerful swing at him.  The blow missed, and the old bear turned excitedly to her bawling offspring.  Miki, hanging joyously to his victim, was oblivious of his danger until Pete’s mother was almost upon him.  He caught sight of her just as her long arm shot out like a wooden beam.  He dodged; and the blow intended for him landed full against the side of the unfortunate Pete’s head with a force that took him clean off his feet and sent him flying like a football twenty yards down the coulee.

Miki did not wait for further results.  Quick as a flash he was in a currant thicket tearing down the little gulch after Neewa.  They came out on the plain together, and for a good ten minutes they did not halt in their flight long enough to look back.  When they did, the coulee was a mile away.  They sat down, panting.  Neewa’s red tongue was hanging out in his exhaustion.  He was scratched and bleeding; loose hair hung all over him.  As he looked at Miki there was something in the dolorous expression of Neewa’s face which was a confession of the fact that he realized Pete had licked him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

After the fight in the coulee there was no longer a thought on the part of Neewa and Miki of returning to the Garden of Eden in which the black currants grew so lusciously.  From the tip of his tail to the end of his nose Miki was an adventurer, and like the nomadic rovers of old he was happiest when on the move.  The wilderness had claimed him now, body and soul, and it is probable that he would have shunned a human camp at this stage of his life, even as Neewa would have shunned it.  But in the lives of beasts, as well as in the lives of men, Fate plays her pranks and tricks, and even as they turned into the vast and mystery-filled spaces of the great lake and waterway-country, to the west, events were slowly shaping themselves into what was to be perhaps the darkest hour of gloom in the life of Miki, son of Hela.