ing 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 bea