a wheezing groan Noozak turned and made her
way slowly toward the big rock alongside which she had been sleeping
when Neewa's fearful cries for help had awakened her. Every bone in her
aged body seemed broken or dislocated. She limped and sagged and moaned
as she walked, and behind her were left little red trails of blood in
the green grass. Makoos had given her a fine pummeling.

She lay down, gave a final groan, and looked at Neewa, as if to say:

"If you hadn't gone off on some deviltry and upset that old viper's
temper this wouldn't have happened. And now--look at ME!"

A young bear would have rallied quickly from the effects of the battle,
but Noozak lay without moving all the rest of that afternoon, and the
night that followed. And that night was by all odds the finest that
Neewa had ever seen. Now that the nights were warm, he had come to love
the moon even more than the sun, for by birth and instinct he was more
a prowler in darkness than a hunter of the day. The moon rose out of
the east in a glory of golden fire. The spruce and balsam forests stood
out like islands in a yellow sea of light, and the creek shimmered and
quivered like a living thing as it wound its way through the glowing
valley. But Neewa had learned his lesson, and though the moon and the
stars called to him he hung close to his mother, listening to the
carnival of night sound that came to him, but never moving away from
her side.

With the morning Noozak rose to her feet, and with a grunting command
for Neewa to follow she slowly climbed the sun-capped ridge. She was in
no mood for travel, but away back in her head was an unexpressed fear
that villainous old Makoos might return, and she knew that another
fight would do her up entirely, in which event Makoos would make a
breakfast of Neewa. So she urged herself down the other side of the
ridge, across a new valley, and through a cut that opened like a wide
door into a rolling plain that was made up of meadows and lakes and
great sweeps of spruce and cedar forest. For a week Noozak had been
making for a certain creek in this plain, and now that the presence of
Makoos threatened behind she kept at her journeying until Neewa's
short, fat legs could scarcely hold up his body.

It was mid-afternoon when they reached the creek, and Neewa was so
exhausted that he had difficulty in climbing the spruce up which his
mother sent him to take a nap. Finding a comfortable crotch he quickly
fell asleep-