whimpered for his mother.

It was the whimper that roused Miki. Slowly he untangled himself
from the ball into which he had rolled, stretched his long and
overgrown legs, and yawned so loudly that the sound reached
Challoner's ears. The man turned and saw two pairs of eyes fixed
upon him from the sheltered hollow under the root. The pup's one
good ear and the other that was half gone stood up alertly, as he
greeted his master with the boundless good cheer of an
irrepressible comradeship. Challoner's face, wet with the drizzle
of the gray skies and bronzed by the wind and storm of fourteen
months in the northland, lighted up with a responsive grin, and
Miki wriggled forth weaving and twisting himself into grotesque
contortions expressive of happiness at being thus directly smiled
at by his master.

With all the room under the root left to him Neewa pulled himself
back until only his round head was showing, and from this fortress
of temporary safety his bright little eyes glared forth at his
mother's murderer.

Vividly the tragedy of yesterday was before him again--the warm,
sun-filled creek bottom in which he and Noozak, his mother, were
hunting a breakfast of crawfish when the man-beast came; the crash
of strange thunder, their flight into the timber, and the end of
it all when his mother turned to confront their enemy. And yet it
was not the death of his mother that remained with him most
poignantly this morning. It was the memory of his own terrific
fight with the white man, and his struggle afterward in the black
and suffocating depths of the bag in which Challoner had brought