sts, as well as in the lives of men, Fate plays her pranks
and tricks, and even as they turned into the vast and mystery-filled
spaces of the great lake and waterway-country, to the west, events were
slowly shaping themselves into what was to be perhaps the darkest hour
of gloom in the life of Miki, son of Hela.

Through six glorious and sun-filled weeks of late summer and early
autumn--until the middle of September--Miki and Neewa ranged the
country westward, always heading toward the setting sun, the country of
Jackson's Knee, of the Touchwood and the Clearwater, and God's Lake. In
this country they saw many things. It was a region a hundred miles
square which the handiwork of Nature had made into a veritable kingdom
of the wild. They came upon great beaver colonies in the dark and
silent places; they watched the otter at play; they came upon moose and
caribou so frequently that they no longer feared or evaded them, but
walked out openly into the meadows or down to the edge of the swamps
where they were feeding. It was here that Miki learned the great lesson
that claw and fang were made to prey upon cloven hoof and horn, for the
wolves were thick, and a dozen times they came upon their kills, and
even more frequently heard the wild tongue of the hunting-packs. Since
his experience with Maheegun he no longer had the desire to join them.
And now Neewa no longer insisted on remaining near meat when they found
it. It was the beginning of the KWASKA-HAO in Neewa--the instinctive
sensing of the Big Change.

Until early in October Miki could see but little of this change in his
comrade. It was then that Neewa became more and more restless, and this
restlessness grew as the chill nights came, and autumn breathed more
heavily in the air. It was Neewa who took the lead in their
peregrinations now, and he seemed always to be questing for
something--a mysterious something which Miki could neither smell nor
see. He no longer slept for hours at a time. By mid-October he slept
scarcely at all, but roved through most of the hours of night as well
as day, eating, eating, eating, and always smelling the wind for that
elusive thing which Nature was commanding him to seek and find.
Ceaselessly he was nosing under windfalls and among the rocks, and Miki
was always near him, always on the QUI VIVE for battle with the thing
that Neewa was hunting out. And it seemed to be never found.

Then Neewa turned back to the east, drawn by the insti