Nomads of the North | Page 7

with uneasy speculation. With a wheezing groan Noozak turned and
made her way slowly toward the big rock alongside which she had been
sleeping when Neewa's fearful cries for help had awakened her. Every
bone in her aged body seemed broken or dislocated. She limped and

sagged and moaned as she walked, and behind her were left little red
trails of blood in the green grass. Makoos had given her a fine
pummeling.
She lay down, gave a final groan, and looked at Neewa, as if to say:
"If you hadn't gone off on some deviltry and upset that old viper's
temper this wouldn't have happened. And now--look at ME!"
A young bear would have rallied quickly from the effects of the battle,
but Noozak lay without moving all the rest of that afternoon, and the
night that followed. And that night was by all odds the finest that
Neewa had ever seen. Now that the nights were warm, he had come to
love the moon even more than the sun, for by birth and instinct he was
more a prowler in darkness than a hunter of the day. The moon rose out
of the east in a glory of golden fire. The spruce and balsam forests
stood out like islands in a yellow sea of light, and the creek shimmered
and quivered like a living thing as it wound its way through the
glowing valley. But Neewa had learned his lesson, and though the
moon and the stars called to him he hung close to his mother, listening
to the carnival of night sound that came to him, but never moving away
from her side.
With the morning Noozak rose to her feet, and with a grunting
command for Neewa to follow she slowly climbed the sun-capped
ridge. She was in no mood for travel, but away back in her head was an
unexpressed fear that villainous old Makoos might return, and she
knew that another fight would do her up entirely, in which event
Makoos would make a breakfast of Neewa. So she urged herself down
the other side of the ridge, across a new valley, and through a cut that
opened like a wide door into a rolling plain that was made up of
meadows and lakes and great sweeps of spruce and cedar forest. For a
week Noozak had been making for a certain creek in this plain, and
now that the presence of Makoos threatened behind she kept at her
journeying until Neewa's short, fat legs could scarcely hold up his
body.
It was mid-afternoon when they reached the creek, and Neewa was so

exhausted that he had difficulty in climbing the spruce up which his
mother sent him to take a nap. Finding a comfortable crotch he quickly
fell asleep--while Noozak went fishing.
The creek was alive with suckers, trapped in the shallow pools after
spawning, and within an hour she had the shore strewn with them.
When Neewa came down out of his cradle, just at the edge of dusk, it
was to a feast at which Noozak had already stuffed herself until she
looked like a barrel. This was his first meal of fish, and for a week
thereafter he lived in a paradise of fish. He ate them morning, noon,
and night, and when he was too full to eat he rolled in them. And
Noozak stuffed herself until it seemed her hide would burst. Wherever
they moved they carried with them a fishy smell that grew older day by
day, and the older it became the more delicious it was to Neewa and his
mother. And Neewa grew like a swelling pod. In that week he gained
three pounds. He had given up nursing entirely now, for Noozak--being
an old bear--had dried up to a point where she was hopelessly
disappointing.
It was early in the evening of the eighth day that Neewa and his mother
lay down in the edge of a grassy knoll to sleep after their day's feasting.
Noozak was by all odds the happiest old bear in all that part of the
northland. Food was no longer a problem for her. In the creek, penned
up in the pools, were unlimited quantities of it, and she had
encountered no other bear to challenge her possession of it. She looked
ahead to uninterrupted bliss in their happy hunting grounds until
midsummer storms emptied the pools, or the berries ripened. And
Neewa, a happy little gourmand, dreamed with her.
It was this day, just as the sun was setting, that a man on his hands and
knees was examining a damp patch of sand five or six miles down the
creek. His sleeves were rolled up, baring his brown arms halfway to the
shoulders and he wore no hat, so