It was a splendid world.  From the tall pinnacle of rock on which they stood it looked like a great sea of sunlight, with only here and there patches of white snow where the winter winds had piled it deep.  Their ridge rose up out of a great valley.  On all sides of them, as far as a man’s eye could have reached, there were blue and black patches of forest, the shimmer of lakes still partly frozen, the sunlit sparkle of rivulet and stream, and the greening open spaces out of which rose the perfumes of the earth.  These smells drifted up like tonic and food to the nostrils of Noozak the big bear.  Down there the earth was already swelling with life.  The buds on the poplars were growing fat and near the bursting point; the grasses were sending out shoots tender and sweet; the camas were filling with juice; the shooting stars, the dog-tooth violets, and the spring beauties were thrusting themselves up into the warm glow of the sun, inviting Noozak and Neewa to the feast.  All these things Noozak smelled with the experience and the knowledge of twenty years of life behind her—­the delicious aroma of the spruce and the jackpine; the dank, sweet scent of water-lily roots and swelling bulbs that came from a thawed-out fen at the foot of the ridge; and over all these things, overwhelming their individual sweetnesses in a still greater thrill of life, the smell of the heart itself!

And Neewa smelled them.  His amazed little body trembled and thrilled for the first time with the excitement of life.  A moment before in darkness, he found himself now in a wonderland of which he had never so much as had a dream.  In these few minutes Nature was at work upon him.  He possessed no knowledge, but instinct was born within him.  He knew this was his world, that the sun and the warmth were for him, and that the sweet things of the earth were inviting him into his heritage.  He puckered up his little brown nose and sniffed the air, and the pungency of everything that was sweet and to be yearned for came to him.

And he listened.  His pointed ears were pricked forward, and up to him came the drone of a wakening earth.  Even the roots of the grasses must have been singing in their joy, for all through that sunlit valley there was the low and murmuring music of a country that was at peace because it was empty of men.  Everywhere was the rippling sound of running water, and he heard strange sounds that he knew was life; the twittering of a rock-sparrow, the silver-toned aria of a black-throated thrush down in the fen, the shrill paean of a gorgeously coloured Canada jay exploring for a nesting place in a brake of velvety balsam.  And then, far over his head, a screaming cry that made him shiver.  It was instinct again that told him in that cry was danger.  Noozak looked up, and saw the shadow of Upisk, the great eagle, as it flung itself between the sun and the earth.  Neewa saw the shadow, and cringed nearer to his mother.