CHAPTER NINE
Had Makoki, the leather-faced old Cree runner between God's Lake
and Fort Churchill, known the history of Miki and Neewa up to the
point where they came to feast on the fat and partly devoured
carcass of the young caribou bull, he would have said that Iskoo
Wapoo, the Good Spirit of the beasts, was watching over them most
carefully. For Makoki had great faith in the forest gods as well
as in those of his own tepee. He would have given the story his
own picturesque version, and would have told it to the little
children of his son's children; and his son's children would have
kept it in their memory for their own children later on.
It was not in the ordained nature of things that a black bear cub
and a Mackenzie hound pup with a dash of Airedale and Spitz in him
should "chum up" together as Neewa and Miki had done. Therefore,
he would have said, the Beneficent Spirit who watched over the
affairs of four-legged beasts must have had an eye on them from
the beginning. It was she--Iskoo Wapoo was a goddess and not a god
--who had made Challoner kill Neewa's mother, the big black bear;
and it was she who had induced him to tie the pup and the cub
together on the same piece of rope, so that when they fell out of
the white man's canoe into the rapids they would not die, but
would be company and salvation for each other.
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