Miki heard the crash of his body and he hugged close to the windfall.  Ten seconds later Ahtik passed within fifty feet of him, a huge and grotesque form in the moonlight, his coughing breath filled with the agony and hopelessness of approaching death.  As swiftly as he had come he was gone, and in his place followed half a score of noiseless shadows passing so quickly that to Miki they were like the coming and the going of the wind.

For many minutes after that he stood and listened but again silence had fallen upon the night.  After a little he went back into the windfall and lay down beside Neewa.

Hours that followed he passed in restless snatches of slumber.  He dreamed of things that he had forgotten.  He dreamed of Challoner.  He dreamed of chill nights and the big fires; he heard his master’s voice and he felt again the touch of his hand; but over it all and through it all ran that wild hunting voice of his own kind.

In the early dawn he came out from under the windfall and smelled of the trail where the wolves and the caribou had passed.  Heretofore it was Neewa who had led in their wandering; now it was Neewa that followed.  His nostrils filled with the heavy scent of the pack, Miki travelled steadily in the direction of the plain.  It took him half an hour to reach the edge of it.  After that he came to a wide and stony out-cropping of the earth over which he nosed the spoor to a low and abrupt descent into the wider range of the valley.

Here he stopped.

Twenty feet under him and fifty feet away lay the partly devoured carcass of the young bull.  It was not this fact that thrilled him until his heart stood still.  From out of the bushy plain had come Maheegun, a renegade she-wolf, to fill herself of the meat which she had not helped to kill.  She was a slinking, hollow-backed, quick-fanged creature, still rib-thin from the sickness that had come of eating a poison-bait; a beast shunned by her own kind—­a coward, a murderess even of her own whelps.  But she was none of these things to Miki.  In her he saw in living flesh and bone what his memory and his instinct recalled to him of his mother.  And his mother had come before Challoner, his master.

For a minute or two he lay trembling, and then he went down, as he would have gone to Challoner; with great caution, with a wilder suspense, but with a strange yearning within him that the man’s presence would have failed to rouse.  He was very close to Maheegun before she was conscious that he was near.  The Mother-smell was warm in his nose now; it filled him with a great joy; and yet—­he was afraid.  But it was not a physical fear.  Flattened on the ground, with his head between his fore-paws, he whined.