In the six hours between midnight and dawn he covered thirty-five miles.

And then he stopped.  Dropping on his belly beside a rock at the crest of a ridge he watched the birth of day.  With drooling jaws and panting breath he rested, until at last the dull gold of the winter sun began to paint the eastern sky.  And then came the first bars of vivid sunlight, shooting over the eastern ramparts as guns flash from behind their battlements, and Miki rose to his feet and surveyed the morning wonder of his world.  Behind him was Fort O’ God, fifty miles away; ahead of him the cabin—­twenty.  It was the cabin he faced as he went down from the ridge.

As the miles between him and the cabin grew fewer and fewer he felt again something of the oppression that had borne upon him at Challoner’s tent.  And yet it was different.  He had run his race.  He had answered The Call.  And now, at the end, he was seized by a fear of what his welcome would be.  For at the cabin he had killed a man—­and the man had belonged to the woman.  His progress became more hesitating.  Mid-forenoon found him only half a mile from the home of Nanette and the baby.  His keen nostrils caught the faint tang of smoke in the air.  He did not follow it up, but circled like a wolf, coming up stealthily and uncertainly until at last he looked out into the little clearing where a new world had come into existence for him.  He saw the sapling cage in which Jacques Le Beau had kept him a prisoner; the door of that cage was still open, as Durant had left it after stealing him; he saw the ploughed-up snow where he had leapt upon the man-brute—­and he whined.

He was facing the cabin door—­and the door was wide open.  He could see no life, but he could smell it.  And smoke was rising from the chimney.  He slunk across the open.  In the manner of his going there was an abject humiliation—­a plea for mercy if he had done wrong, a prayer to the creatures he worshipped that he might not be driven away.

He came to the door, and peered in.  The room was empty.  Nanette was not there.  Then his ears shot forward and his body grew suddenly tense, and he listened, listened, listened to a soft, cooing sound that was coming from the crib.  He swallowed hard; the faintest whine rose in his throat and his claws clicked, clicked, clicked, across the floor and he thrust his great head over the side of the little bed.  The baby was there.  With his warm tongue he kissed it—­just once—­and then, with another deep breath, lay down on the floor.

He heard footsteps.  Nanette came in with her arms filled with blankets; she carried these into the smaller room, and returned, before she saw him.  For a moment she stared.  Then, with a strange little cry, she ran to him; and once more he felt her arms about him; and he cried like a puppy with his muzzle against her breast, and Nanette laughed and sobbed, and in the crib the baby kicked and squealed and thrust her tiny moccasined feet up into the air.