-while Noozak went fishing.

The creek was alive with suckers, trapped in the shallow pools after
spawning, and within an hour she had the shore strewn with them. When
Neewa came down out of his cradle, just at the edge of dusk, it was to
a feast at which Noozak had already stuffed herself until she looked
like a barrel. This was his first meal of fish, and for a week
thereafter he lived in a paradise of fish. He ate them morning, noon,
and night, and when he was too full to eat he rolled in them. And
Noozak stuffed herself until it seemed her hide would burst. Wherever
they moved they carried with them a fishy smell that grew older day by
day, and the older it became the more delicious it was to Neewa and his
mother. And Neewa grew like a swelling pod. In that week he gained
three pounds. He had given up nursing entirely now, for Noozak--being
an old bear--had dried up to a point where she was hopelessly
disappointing.

It was early in the evening of the eighth day that Neewa and his mother
lay down in the edge of a grassy knoll to sleep after their day's
feasting. Noozak was by all odds the happiest old bear in all that part
of the northland. Food was no longer a problem for her. In the creek,
penned up in the pools, were unlimited quantities of it, and she had
encountered no other bear to challenge her possession of it. She looked
ahead to uninterrupted bliss in their happy hunting grounds until
midsummer storms emptied the pools, or the berries ripened. And Neewa,
a happy little gourmand, dreamed with her.

It was this day, just as the sun was setting, that a man on his hands
and knees was examining a damp patch of sand five or six miles down the
creek. His sleeves were rolled up, baring his brown arms halfway to the
shoulders and he wore no hat, so that the evening breeze ruffled a
ragged head of blond hair that for a matter of eight or nine months had
been cut with a hunting knife.

Close on one side of this individual was a tin pail, and on the other,
eying him with the keenest interest, one of the homeliest and yet one
of the most companionable-looking dog pups ever born of a Mackenzie
hound father and a mother half Airedale and half Spitz.

With this tragedy of blood in his veins nothing in the world could have
made the pup anything more than "just dog." His tail,--stretched out
straight on the sand, was long and lean, with a knot at every joint;
his paws, like an overgrown boy's feet, looked like small
b