ding doom. It was THUNDER. The warning
was too late. Before men could turn back to safety, or build themselves
shelters, the Big Storm was upon them. For three days and three nights
it raged like a mad bull from out of the north. In the open barrens no
living creature could stand upon its feet. The forests were broken, and
all the earth was smothered. All things that breathed buried
themselves--or died; for the snow that piled itself up in windrows and
mountains was round and hard as leaden shot, and with it came an
intense cold.

On the third day it was sixty degrees below zero in the country between
the Shamattawa and Jackson's Knee. Not until the fourth day did living
things begin to move. Moose and caribou heaved themselves up out of the
thick covering of snow that had been their protection; smaller animals
dug their way out of the heart of deep drifts and mounds; a half of the
rabbits and birds were dead. But the most terrible toll was of men.
Many of those who were caught out succeeded in keeping the life within
their bodies, and dragged themselves back to teepee and shack. But
there were also many who did not return--five hundred who died between
Hudson Bay and the Athabasca in those three terrible days of the
KUSKETA PIPPOON.

In the beginning of the Big Storm Miki found himself in the "burnt"
country of Jackson's Knee, and instinct sent him quickly into deeper
timber. Here he crawled into a windfall of tangled trunks and
tree-tops, and during the three days he did not move. Buried in the
heart of the storm, there came upon him an overwhelming desire to
return to Neewa's den, and to snuggle up to him once more, even though
Neewa lay as if dead. The strange comradeship that had grown up between
the two--their wanderings together all through the summer, the joys and
hardships of the days and months in which they had fought and feasted
like brothers--were memories as vivid in his brain as if it had all
happened yesterday. And in the dark wind-fall, buried deeper and deeper
under the snow, he dreamed.

He dreamed of Challoner, who had been his master in the days of his
joyous puppyhood; he dreamed of the time when Neewa, the motherless
cub, was brought into camp, and of the happenings that had come to them
afterward; the loss of his master, of their strange and thrilling
adventures in the wilderness, and last of all of Neewa's denning-up. He
could not understand that. Awake, and listening to the storm, he
wonder