His eyes shifted slowly, and then they rested on the scarp of the ridge
that shut out his vision. His heart gave a sudden thump in his body.
His pipe fell from his mouth to his hand; and he stared without moving,
stared like a thing of rock.

On a flat sunlit shelf not more than eighty or ninety yards away stood
a young black bear. In the warm glow of the sunlight the bear's spring
coat shone like polished jet. But it was not the sudden appearance of
the bear that amazed Meshaba. It was the fact that another animal was
standing shoulder to shoulder with Wakayoo, and that it was not a
brother bear, but a huge wolf. Slowly one of his thin hands rose to his
eyes and he wiped away what he thought must surely be a strange
something that was fooling his vision. In all his eighty years and odd
he had never known a wolf to be thus friendly with a bear. Nature had
made them enemies. Nature had fore-doomed their hatred to be the
deepest hatred of the forests. Therefore, for a space, Meshaba doubted
his eyes. But in another moment he saw that the miracle had truly come
to pass. For the wolf turned broadside to him and it WAS a wolf! A
huge, big-boned beast that stood as high at the shoulders as Wakayoo,
the bear; a great beast, with a great head, and--

It was then that Meshaba's heart gave another thump, for the tail of a
wolf is big and bushy in the springtime, and the tail of this beast was
as bare of hair as a beaver's tail!

"Ohne moosh!" gasped Meshaba, under his breath--"a dog!"

He seemed to draw slowly into himself, slinking backward. His rifle
stood just out of reach on the other side of the rock.

At the other end of that eighty or ninety yards Neewa and Miki stood
blinking in the bright sunlight, with the mouth of the cavern in which
Neewa had slept so many months just behind them. Miki was puzzled.
Again it seemed to him that it was only yesterday, and not months ago,
that he had left Neewa in that den, sleeping his lazy head off. And now
that he had returned to him after his own hard winter in the forests he
was astonished to find Neewa so big. For Neewa had grown steadily
through his four months' nap and he was half again as big as when he
went to sleep. Could Miki have spoken Cree, and had Meshaba given him
the opportunity, he might have explained the situation.

"You see, Mr. Indian"--he might have said--"this dub of a bear and I
have been pals from just about the time we were born. A man named
Challoner