nct of his
forefathers; back toward the country of Noozak, his mother, and of
Soominitik, his father; and Miki followed. The nights grew more and
more chill. The stars seemed farther away, and no longer was the forest
moon red like blood. The cry of the loon had a moaning note in it, a
note of grief and lamentation. And in their shacks and tepees the
forest people sniffed the air of frosty mornings, and soaked their
traps in fish-oil and beaver-grease, and made their moccasins, and
mended snow-shoe and sledge, for the cry of the loon said that winter
was creeping down out of the North. And the swamps grew silent. The cow
moose no longer mooed to her young. In place of it, from the open plain
and "burn" rose the defiant challenge of bull to bull and the deadly
clash of horn against horn under the stars of night. The wolf no longer
howled to hear his voice. In the travel of padded feet there came to be
a slinking, hunting caution. In all the forest world blood was running
red again.

And then--November.

Perhaps Miki would never forget that first day when the snow came. At
first he thought all the winged things in the world were shedding their
white feathers. Then he felt the fine, soft touch of it under his feet,
and the chill. It sent the blood rushing like a new kind of fire
through his body; a wild and thrilling joy--the exultation that leaps
through the veins of the wolf when the winter comes.

With Neewa its effect was different--so different that even Miki felt
the oppression of it, and waited vaguely and anxiously for what was to
come. And then, on this day of the first snow, he saw his comrade do a
strange and unaccountable thing. He began to eat things that he had
never touched as food before. He lapped up soft pine needles, and
swallowed them. He ate of the dry, pulpy substance of rotted logs. And
then he went into a great cleft broken into the heart of a rocky ridge,
and found at last the thing for which he had been seeking. It was a
cavern--deep, and dark, and warm.

Nature works in strange ways. She gives to the birds of the air eyes
which men may never have, and she gives to the beasts of the earth an
instinct which men may never know. For Neewa had come back to sleep his
first Long Sleep in the place of his birth--the cavern in which Noozak,
his mother, had brought him into the world.

His old bed was still there, the wallow in the soft sand, the blanket
of hair Noozak had shed; but the smell of his