His nostrils filled with the heavy scent of
the pack, Miki travelled steadily in the direction of the plain.
It took him half an hour to reach the edge of it. After that he
came to a wide and stony out-cropping of the earth over which he
nosed the spoor to a low and abrupt descent into the wider range
of the valley.
Here he stopped.
Twenty feet under him and fifty feet away lay the partly devoured
carcass of the young bull. It was not this fact that thrilled him
until his heart stood still. From out of the bushy plain had come
Maheegun, a renegade she-wolf, to fill herself of the meat which
she had not helped to kill. She was a slinking, hollow-backed,
quick-fanged creature, still rib-thin from the sickness that had
come of eating a poison-bait; a beast shunned by her own kind--a
coward, a murderess even of her own whelps. But she was none of
these things to Miki. In her he saw in living flesh and bone what
his memory and his instinct recalled to him of his mother. And his
mother had come before Challoner, his master.
For a minute or two he lay trembling, and then he went down, as he
would have gone to Challoner; with great caution, with a wilder
suspense, but with a strange yearning within him that the man's
presence would have failed to rouse.
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