see if the wind had shifted. After all, it was not so much a
matter of human cunning. Everything was in Challoner's favour.

In a wide, flat part of the valley where the creek split itself
into a dozen little channels, and the water rippled between sandy
bars and over pebbly shallows, Neewa and his mother were nosing
about lazily for a breakfast of crawfish. The world had never
looked more beautiful to Neewa. The sun made the soft hair on his
back fluff up like that of a purring cat. He liked the plash of
wet sand under his feet and the singing gush of water against his
legs. He liked the sound that was all about him, the breath of the
wind, the whispers that came out of the spruce-tops and the
cedars, the murmur of water, the TWIT-TWIT of the rock rabbits,
the call of birds; and more than all else the low, grunting talk
of his mother.

It was in this sun-bathed sweep of the valley that Noozak caught
the first whiff of danger. It came to her in a sudden twist of the
wind--the smell of man!

Instantly she was turned into rock. There was still the deep scar
in her shoulder which had come, years before, with that same smell
of the one enemy she feared. For three summers she had not caught
the taint in her nostrils and she had almost forgotten its
existence. Now, so suddenly that it paralyzed her, it was warm and
terrible in the breath of the wind.

In this moment, too, Neewa seemed to sense the nearness of an
appalling danger. Two hundred yards from Challoner he stood a
motionless blotch of jet against the white of the sand about him,