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.
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