see no trace of his meat. Even the
ground about it was black.

He rushed out from the rocks with his lips drawn back, just as he had
rushed a dozen or more times before. There was a mighty roar of wings.
The air was darkened by them, and the ravenish screaming that followed
could have been heard a mile away. This time Kakakew and his mighty
crew did not fly back to the forest. Their number gave them courage.
The taste of Ahtik's flesh and the flavour of it in their nostrils
intoxicated them, to the point of madness, with desire. Neewa was
dazed. Over him, behind him, on all sides of him they swept and
circled, croaking and screaming at him, the boldest of them swooping
down to beat at him with their wings. Thicker grew the menacing cloud,
and then suddenly it descended like an avalanche. It covered Ahtik
again. In it Neewa was fairly smothered. He felt himself buried under a
mass of wings and bodies, and he began fighting, as he had fought the
owls. A score of pincer-like black beaks fought to get at his hair and
hide; others stabbed at his eyes; he felt his ears being pulled from
his head, and the end of his nose was a bloody cushion within a dozen
seconds. The breath was beaten out of him; he was blinded, and dazed,
and every square inch of him was aquiver with its own excruciating
pain. He forgot Ahtik. The one thing in the world he wanted most was a
large open space in which to run.

Putting all his strength into the effort he struggled to his feet and
charged through the mass of living things about him. At this sign of
defeat many of the crows left him to join in the feast. By the time he
was half way to the cover into which Maheegun had gone all but one had
left him. That one may have been Kakakew himself. He had fastened
himself like a rat-trap to Neewa's stubby tail, and there he hung on
like grim death while Neewa ran. He kept his hold until his victim was
well into the cover. Then he flopped himself into the air and rejoined
his brethren at the putrified carcass of the bull.

If ever Neewa had wanted Miki he wanted him now. Again his entire
viewpoint of the world was changed. He was stabbed in a hundred places.
He burned as if afire. Even the bottoms of his feet hurt him when he
stepped on them, and for half an hour he hid himself under a bush,
licking his wounds and sniffing the air for Miki.

Then he went down the slope into the creek bottom, and hurried to the
foot of the trail he had made to and from t