During the first few moments in which the canoe moved swiftly over the
surface of the lake an amazing change had taken place in Neewa.
Challoner did not see it, and Miki was unconscious of it. But every
fibre in Neewa's body was atremble, and his heart was thumping as it
had pounded on that glorious day of the fight between his mother and
the old he-bear. It seemed to him that everything that he had lost was
coming back to him, and that all would be well very soon--FOR HE
SMELLED HIS MOTHER! And then he discovered that the scent of her was
warm and strong in the furry black mass under his feet, and he
smothered himself down in it, flat on his plump little belly, and
peered at Challoner over his paws.
It was hard for him to understand--the man-beast back there, sending
the canoe through the water, and under him his mother, warm and soft,
but so deadly still! He could not keep the whimper out of his
throat--his low and grief-filled call for HER. And there was no answer,
except Miki's responsive whine, the crying of one child for another.
Neewa's mother did not move. She made no sound. And he could see
nothing of her but her black and furry skin--without head, without
feet, without the big, bald paws he had loved to tickle, and the ears
he had loved to nip. There was nothing of her but the patch of black
skin--and the SMELL.
But a great comfort warmed his frightened little soul. He felt the
protecting nearness of an unconquerable and abiding force and in the
first of the warm sunshine his back fluffed up, and he thrust his brown
nose between his paws and into his mother's fur. Miki, as if vainly
striving to solve the mystery of his new-found chum, was watching him
closely from between his own fore-paws. In his comical head--adorned
with its one good ear and its one bad one, and furthermore beautified
by the outstanding whiskers inherited from his Airedale ancestor--he
was trying to come to some sort of an understanding. At the outset he
had accepted Neewa as a friend and a comrade--and Neewa had thanklessly
given him a good mauling for his trouble. That much Miki could forgive
and forget. What he could not forgive was the utter lack of regard
which Neewa seemed to possess for him. His playful antics had gained no
recognition from the cub. When he had barked and hopped about,
flattening and contorting himself in warm invitation for him to join in
a game of tag or a wrestling match, Neewa had simply stared at him like
an idiot. He was wondering, perhaps, if Neewa would enjoy anything
besides a fight. It was a long time before he decided to make another
experiment.
It was, as a matter of fact, halfway between breakfast and noon. In all
that time Neewa had scarcely moved, and Miki was finding himself bored
to death. The discomfort of last night's storm was only a memory, and
overhead there was a sun unshadowed by cloud. More than an hour before
Challoner's canoe had left the lake, and was now in the clear-running
water of a stream that was making its way down the southward slope of
the divide between Jackson's Knee and the Shamattawa. It was a new
stream to Challoner, fed by the large lake above, and guarding himself
against the treachery of waterfall and rapid he kept a keen lookout
ahead. For a matter of half an hour the water had been growing steadily
swifter, and Challoner was satisfied that before very long he would be
compelled to make a portage. A little later he heard ahead of him the
low and steady murmur which told him he was approaching a danger zone.
As he shot around the next bend, hugging fairly close to shore, he saw,
four or five hundred yards below him, a rock-frothed and boiling
maelstrom of water.
Swiftly his eyes measured the situation. The rapids ran between an
almost precipitous shore on one side and a deep forest on the other. He
saw at a glance that it was the forest side over which he must make the
portage, and this was the shore opposite him and farthest away.
Swinging his canoe at a 45-degree angle he put all the strength of body
and arms into the sweep of his paddle. There would be just time to
reach the other shore before the current became dangerous. Above the
sweep of the rapids he could now hear the growling roar of a waterfall
below.
It was at this unfortunate moment that Miki decided to venture one more
experiment with Neewa. With a friendly yip he swung out one of his
paws. Now Miki's paw, for a pup, was monstrously big, and his foreleg
was long and lanky, so that when the paw landed squarely on the end of
Neewa's nose it was like the swing of a prize-fighter's glove. The
unexpectedness of it was a further decisive feature in the situation;
and, on top of this, Miki swung his other paw around like a club and
caught Neewa a jolt in the eye. This was too much, even from a friend,
and with a sudden snarl Neewa bounced out of his nest and clinched with
the pup.
Now the fact was that Miki, who had so ingloriously begged for mercy in
their first scrimmage, came of fighting stock himself. Mix the blood of
a Mackenzie hound--which is the biggest-footed, biggest-shouldered,
most powerful dog in the northland--with the blood of a Spitz and an
Airedale and something is bound to come of it. While the Mackenzie dog,
with his ox-like strength, is peaceable and good-humoured in all sorts
of weather, there is a good deal of the devil in the northern Spitz and
Airedale and it is a question which likes a fight the best. And all at
once good-humoured little Miki felt the devil rising in him. This time
he did not yap for mercy. He met Neewa's jaws, and in two seconds they
were staging a first-class fight on the bit of precarious footing in
the prow of the canoe.
Vainly Challoner yelled at them as he paddled desperately to beat out
the danger of the rapids. Neewa and Miki were too absorbed to hear him.
Miki's four paws were paddling the air again, but this time his sharp
teeth were firmly fixed in the loose hide under Neewa's neck, and with
his paws he continued to kick and bat in a way that promised
effectively to pummel the wind out of Neewa had not the thing happened
which Challoner feared. Still in a clinch they rolled off the prow of
the canoe into the swirling current of the stream.
For ten seconds or so they utterly disappeared. Then they bobbed up, a
good fifty feet below him, their heads close together as they sped
swiftly toward the doom that awaited them, and a choking cry broke from
Challoner's lips. He was powerless to save them, and in his cry was the
anguish of real grief. For many weeks Miki had been his only chum and
comrade.
Held together by the yard-long rope to which they were fastened, Miki
and Neewa swept into the frothing turmoil of the rapids. For Miki it
was the kindness of fate that had inspired his master to fasten him to
the same rope with Neewa. Miki, at three months of age--weight,
fourteen pounds--was about 80 per cent. bone and only a half of 1 per
cent. fat; while Neewa, weight thirteen pounds, was about 90 per cent.
fat. Therefore Miki had the floating capacity of a small anchor, while
Neewa was a first-class life-preserver, and almost unsinkable.
In neither of the youngsters was there a yellow streak. Both were of
fighting stock, and, though Miki was under water most of the time
during their first hundred-yard dash through the rapids, never for an
instant did he give up the struggle to keep his nose in the air.
Sometimes he was on his back and sometimes on his belly; but no matter
what his position, he kept his four overgrown paws going like paddles.
To an extent this helped Neewa in the heroic fight he was making to
keep from shipping too much water himself. Had he been alone his ten or
eleven pounds of fat would have carried him down-stream like a toy
balloon covered with fur, but, with the fourteen-pound drag around his
neck, the problem of not going under completely was a serious one. Half
a dozen times he did disappear for an instant when some undertow caught
Miki and dragged him down--head, tail, legs, and all. But Neewa always
rose again, his four fat legs working for dear life.
Then came the waterfall. By this time Miki had become accustomed to
travelling under water, and the full horror of the new cataclysm into
which they were plunged was mercifully lost to him. His paws had almost
ceased their motion. He was still conscious of the roar in his ears,
but the affair was less unpleasant than it was at the beginning. In
fact, he was drowning. To Neewa the pleasant sensations of a painless
death were denied. No cub in the world was wider awake than he when the
final catastrophe came. His head was well above water and he was
clearly possessed of all his senses. Then the river itself dropped out
from under him and he shot down in an avalanche of water, feeling no
longer the drag of Miki's weight at his neck.
How deep the pool was at the bottom of the waterfall Challoner might
have guessed quite accurately. Could Neewa have expressed an opinion of
his own, he would have sworn that it was a mile. Miki was past the
stage of making estimates, or of caring whether it was two feet or two
leagues. His paws had ceased to operate and he had given himself up
entirely to his fate. But Neewa came up again, and Miki followed, like
a bobber. He was about to gasp his last gasp when the force of the
current, as it swung out of the whirlpool, flung Neewa upon a bit of
partly submerged driftage, and in a wild and strenuous effort to make
himself safe Neewa dragged Miki's head out of water so that the pup
hung at the edge of the driftage like a hangman's victim at the end of
his rope.