After the fight in the coulee there was no longer a thought on the part
of Neewa and Miki of returning to the Garden of Eden in which the black
currants grew so lusciously. From the tip of his tail to the end of his
nose Miki was an adventurer, and like the nomadic rovers of old he was
happiest when on the move. The wilderness had claimed him now, body and
soul, and it is probable that he would have shunned a human camp at
this stage of his life, even as Neewa would have shunned it. But in the
lives of beasts, as well as in the lives of men, Fate plays her pranks
and tricks, and even as they turned into the vast and mystery-filled
spaces of the great lake and waterway-country, to the west, events were
slowly shaping themselves into what was to be perhaps the darkest hour
of gloom in the life of Miki, son of Hela.
Through six glorious and sun-filled weeks of late summer and early
autumn--until the middle of September--Miki and Neewa ranged the
country westward, always heading toward the setting sun, the country of
Jackson's Knee, of the Touchwood and the Clearwater, and God's Lake. In
this country they saw many things. It was a region a hundred miles
square which the handiwork of Nature had made into a veritable kingdom
of the wild. They came upon great beaver colonies in the dark and
silent places; they watched the otter at play; they came upon moose and
caribou so frequently that they no longer feared or evaded them, but
walked out openly into the meadows or down to the edge of the swamps
where they were feeding. It was here that Miki learned the great lesson
that claw and fang were made to prey upon cloven hoof and horn, for the
wolves were thick, and a dozen times they came upon their kills, and
even more frequently heard the wild tongue of the hunting-packs. Since
his experience with Maheegun he no longer had the desire to join them.
And now Neewa no longer insisted on remaining near meat when they found
it. It was the beginning of the KWASKA-HAO in Neewa--the instinctive
sensing of the Big Change.
Until early in October Miki could see but little of this change in his
comrade. It was then that Neewa became more and more restless, and this
restlessness grew as the chill nights came, and autumn breathed more
heavily in the air. It was Neewa who took the lead in their
peregrinations now, and he seemed always to be questing for
something--a mysterious something which Miki could neither smell nor
see. He no longer slept for hours at a time. By mid-October he slept
scarcely at all, but roved through most of the hours of night as well
as day, eating, eating, eating, and always smelling the wind for that
elusive thing which Nature was commanding him to seek and find.
Ceaselessly he was nosing under windfalls and among the rocks, and Miki
was always near him, always on the QUI VIVE for battle with the thing
that Neewa was hunting out. And it seemed to be never found.
Then Neewa turned back to the east, drawn by the instinct of his
forefathers; back toward the country of Noozak, his mother, and of
Soominitik, his father; and Miki followed. The nights grew more and
more chill. The stars seemed farther away, and no longer was the forest
moon red like blood. The cry of the loon had a moaning note in it, a
note of grief and lamentation. And in their shacks and tepees the
forest people sniffed the air of frosty mornings, and soaked their
traps in fish-oil and beaver-grease, and made their moccasins, and
mended snow-shoe and sledge, for the cry of the loon said that winter
was creeping down out of the North. And the swamps grew silent. The cow
moose no longer mooed to her young. In place of it, from the open plain
and "burn" rose the defiant challenge of bull to bull and the deadly
clash of horn against horn under the stars of night. The wolf no longer
howled to hear his voice. In the travel of padded feet there came to be
a slinking, hunting caution. In all the forest world blood was running
red again.
And then--November.
Perhaps Miki would never forget that first day when the snow came. At
first he thought all the winged things in the world were shedding their
white feathers. Then he felt the fine, soft touch of it under his feet,
and the chill. It sent the blood rushing like a new kind of fire
through his body; a wild and thrilling joy--the exultation that leaps
through the veins of the wolf when the winter comes.
With Neewa its effect was different--so different that even Miki felt
the oppression of it, and waited vaguely and anxiously for what was to
come. And then, on this day of the first snow, he saw his comrade do a
strange and unaccountable thing. He began to eat things that he had
never touched as food before. He lapped up soft pine needles, and
swallowed them. He ate of the dry, pulpy substance of rotted logs. And
then he went into a great cleft broken into the heart of a rocky ridge,
and found at last the thing for which he had been seeking. It was a
cavern--deep, and dark, and warm.
Nature works in strange ways. She gives to the birds of the air eyes
which men may never have, and she gives to the beasts of the earth an
instinct which men may never know. For Neewa had come back to sleep his
first Long Sleep in the place of his birth--the cavern in which Noozak,
his mother, had brought him into the world.
His old bed was still there, the wallow in the soft sand, the blanket
of hair Noozak had shed; but the smell of his mother was gone. In the
nest where he was born Neewa lay down, and for the last time he grunted
softly to Miki. It was as if he felt upon him the touch of a hand,
gentle but inevitable, which he could no longer refuse to obey, and to
Miki was saying, for the last time: "Good-night!"
That night the PIPOO KESTIN--the first storm of winter--came like an
avalanche from out of the North. With it came a wind that was like the
roaring of a thousand bulls, and over all the land of the wild there
was nothing that moved. Even in the depth of the cavern Miki heard the
beat and the wail of it and the swishing of the shot-like snow beyond
the door through which they had come, and he snuggled close to Neewa,
content that they had found shelter.
With the day he went to the slit in the face of the rock, and in his
astonishment he made no sound, but stared forth upon a world that was
no longer the world he had left last night. Everywhere it was white--a
dazzling, eye-blinding white. The sun had risen. It shot a thousand
flashing shafts of radiant light into Miki's eyes. So far as his vision
could reach the earth was as if covered with a robe of diamonds. From
rock and tree and shrub blazed the fire of the sun; it quivered in the
tree-tops, bent low with their burden of snow; it was like a sea in the
valley, so vivid that the unfrozen stream running through the heart of
it was black. Never had Miki seen a day so magnificent. Never had his
heart pounded at the sight of the sun as it pounded now, and never had
his blood burned with a wilder exultation. He whined, and ran back to
Neewa. He barked in the gloom of the cavern and gave his comrade a
nudge with his nose. Neewa grunted sleepily. He stretched himself,
raised his head for an instant, and then curled himself into a ball
again. Vainly Miki protested that it was day, and time for them to be
moving. Neewa made no response, and after a while Miki returned to the
mouth of the cavern, and looked back to see if Neewa was following him.
Then, disappointed, he went out into the snow. For an hour he did not
move farther than ten feet away from the den. Three times he returned
to Neewa and urged him to get up and come out where it was light. In
that far corner of the cavern it was dark, and it was as if he were
trying to tell Neewa that he was a dunce to lie there still thinking it
was night when the sun was up outside. But he failed. Neewa was in the
edge of his Long Sleep--the beginning of USKE-POW-A-MEW, the dream land
of the bears.
Annoyance, the desire almost to sink his teeth in Neewa's ear, gave
place slowly to another thing in Miki. The instinct that between beasts
is like the spoken reason of men stirred in a strange and disquieting
way within him. He became more and more uneasy. There was almost
distress in his restlessness as he hovered about the mouth of the
cavern. A last time he went to Neewa, and then he started alone down
into the valley.
He was hungry, but on this first day after the storm there was small
chance of him finding anything to eat. The snowshoe rabbits were
completely buried under their windfalls and shelters, and lay quietly
in their warm nests. Nothing had moved during the hours of the storm.
There were no trails of living things for him to follow, and in places
he sank to his shoulders in the soft snow. He made his way to the
creek. It was no longer the creek he had known. It was edged with ice.
There was something dark and brooding about it now. The sound it made
was no longer the rippling song of summer and golden autumn. There was
a threat in its gurgling monotone--a new voice, as if a black and
forbidding spirit had taken possession of it and was warning him that
the times had changed, and that new laws and a new force had come to
claim sovereignty in the land of his birth.
He drank of the water cautiously. It was cold--ice-cold. Slowly it was
being impinged upon him that in the beauty of this new world that was
his there was no longer the warm and pulsing beat of the heart that was
life. He was alone. ALONE! Everything else was covered up; everything
else seemed dead.
He went back to Neewa and lay close to him all through the day. And
through the night that followed he did not move again from the cavern.
He went only as far as the door and saw celestial spaces ablaze with
stars and a moon that rode up into the heavens like a white sun. They,
too, seemed no longer like the moon and stars he had known. They were
terribly still and cold. And under them the earth was terribly white
and silent.
With the coming of dawn he tried once more to awaken Neewa. But this
time he was not so insistent. Nor did he have the desire to nip Neewa
with his teeth. Something had happened--something which he could not
understand. He sensed the thing, but he could not reason it. And he was
filled with a strange and foreboding fear.
He went down again to hunt. Under the glory of the moon and stars it
had been a wild night of carnival for the rabbits, and in the edge of
the timber Miki found the snow beaten hard in places with their tracks.
It was not difficult for him to stalk his breakfast this morning. He
made his kill, and feasted. He killed again after that, and still
again. He could have gone on killing, for now that the snow betrayed
them, the hiding-places of the rabbits were so many traps for them.
Miki's courage returned. He was fired again with the joy of life. Never
had he known such hunting, never had he found such a treasure-house
before--not even in the coulee where the currants grew. He ate until he
could eat no more, and then he went back to Neewa, carrying with him
one of the rabbits he had slain. He dropped it in front of his comrade,
and whined. Even then Neewa did not respond, except to draw a deeper
breath, and change his position a little.
That afternoon, for the first time in many hours, Neewa rose to his
feet, stretched himself, and sniffed of the dead rabbit. But he did not
eat. To Miki's consternation he rolled himself round and round in his
nest of sand and went to sleep again.
The next day, at about the same time, Neewa roused himself once more.
This time he went as far as the mouth of the den, and lapped up a few
mouthfuls of snow. But he still refused to eat the rabbit. Again it was
Nature telling him that he must not disturb the pine needles and dry
bark with which he had padded his stomach and intestines. And he went
to sleep again. He did not get up after that.
Day followed day, and, growing lonelier as the winter deepened, Miki
hunted alone. All through November he came back each night and slept
with Neewa. And Neewa was as if dead, except that his body was warm,
and he breathed, and made little sounds now and then in his throat. But
this did not satisfy the great yearning that was becoming more and more
insistent in Miki's soul, the overwhelming desire for company, for a
brotherhood on the trail. He loved Neewa. Through the first long weeks
of winter he returned to him faithfully; he brought him meat. He was
filled with a strange grief--even greater than if Neewa had been dead.
For Miki knew that he was alive, and he could not account for the thing
that had happened. Death he would have understood, and FROM death he
would have gone away--for good.
So it came that one night, having hunted far, Miki remained away from
the den for the first time, and slept under a deep windfall. After that
it was still harder for him to resist the CALL. A second and a third
night he went away; and then came the time--inevitable as the coming
and going of the moon and stars--when understanding at last broke its
way through his hope and his fear, and something told him that Neewa
would never again travel with him as through those glorious days of
old, when shoulder to shoulder they had faced together the comedies and
tragedies of life in a world that was no longer soft and green and warm
with a golden sun, but white, and still, and filled with death.
Neewa did not know when Miki went away from the den for the last time.
And yet it may be that even in his slumber the Beneficent Spirit may
have whispered that Miki was going, for there were restlessness and
disquiet in Neewa's dreamland for many days thereafter.
"Be quiet--and sleep!" the Spirit may have whispered. "The Winter is
long. The rivers are black and chill, the lakes are covered with floors
of ice, and the waterfalls are frozen like great white giants. Sleep!
For Miki must go his way, just as the waters of the streams must go
their way to the sea. For he is Dog. And you are Bear. SLEEP!"