runs, as the blood of Durant's POOS shall run when you sink those
teeth in its jugular. And to-morrow we are going to give you the
test--such a beautiful test!--with the wild dog that is robbing my
traps and tearing my fishers into bits. For I will catch him, and you
shall fight him until he is almost dead; and then I shall cut his heart
out alive, as I have promised, and you will eat it while it is still
beating, so that there will be no excuse for your losing to that POOS
which M'sieu Durant will bring down. COMPRENEZ? It will be a beautiful
test--to-morrow. And if you fail I will kill you. OUI; if you so much
as let a whimper out of you, I will kill you--dead."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

That same night, ten miles to the west, Miki slept under a windfall of
logs and treetops not more than half a mile from Le Beau's trapline.

In the early dawn, when Le Beau left his cabin, accompanied by Netah,
The Killer, Miki came out from under his windfall after a night of
troublous dreams. He had dreamed of those first weeks after he had lost
his master, when Neewa was always at his side; and the visions that had
come to him filled him with an uneasiness and a loneliness that made
him whine as he stood watching the dark shadows fading away before the
coming of day. Could Le Beau have seen him there, as the first of the
cold sun struck upon him, the words which he had repeated over and over
to The Killer would have stuck in his throat. For at eleven months of
age Miki was a young giant of his breed. He weighed sixty pounds, and
none of that sixty was fat. His body was as slim and as lean as a
wolf's. His chest was massive, and over it the muscles rolled like
BABICHE cord when he moved. His legs were like the legs of Hela, the
big Mackenzie hound who was his father; and with his jaws he could
crack a caribou bone as Le Beau might have cracked it with a stone. For
eight of the eleven months of his life the wilderness had been his
master; it had tempered him to the hardness of living steel; it had
wrought him without abeyance to age in the mould of its pitiless
schooling--had taught him to fight for his life, to kill that he might
live, and to use his brain before he used his jaws. He was as powerful
as Netah, The Killer, who was twice his age, and with his strength he
possessed a cunning and a quickness which The Killer would never know.
Thus had the raw wilderness prepared him for this day.

As the sun fired up the forest with