James Oliver Curwood

“ Meat was too plentiful, and those of them who were over their gorge were off on a fresh kill far to the west. Once or twice Neewa and Brimstone heard their distant cry. Again through a star-filled, radiant night they watched and listened, and slept at times. In the soft gray dawn they went forth once more to their feast.
And here is where Makoki, the old Cree runner, would have emphasized the presence of the Beneficent Spirit. For day followed day, and night followed night, and Ahtik's flesh and blood put into Neewa and Brimstone a strength and growth that developed marvelously. ”

“ For an hour Brimstone did not move. The fire burned itself low. The old Cree wrapped himself in a blanket and the white man went into his tent. Not until then did the pup dare to crawl out from under the spruce. With his bruised shoulder making him limp at every step, he hurried back over the trail which he had followed so hopefully a little while before. The man-scent no longer made his heart beat swiftly with joy. It was a menace now, a warning, a thing from which he wanted to get away. He would sooner have faced Oochak again, or the owls, than the white man with his club. ”

“ Three or four times a year a wolf might have caught the scent of man in it. It was there to-night. For a space Brimstone was turned into the rigidity of rock by a single overwhelming emotion. All other things were forgotten in the fact that he had struck the trail of man—and therefore the trail of Challoner, his master. ”

“ With Neewa, fat and good humor and contentment were all synonymous. As long as the meat held out, there was no very great temptation for him beyond the dip and the slope. Two or three times a day he went down to the creek; and every morning and afternoon, and especially about sunset, he had his fun rolling downhill. In addition to this he began taking his afternoon naps in the crotch of a small sapling. As Brimstone could see neither sense nor sport in tobogganing, and as he could not climb a tree, he began to spend more and more time in adventuring up and down the foot of the ridge. ”

“ His trail entered the dip through the pile of rocks from which Brimstone and he had watched the battle between Maheegun and the two owls, and as a matter of caution he always paused for a few moments among these rocks to make sure that all was well in the open. This morning he received a decided shock. Ahtik's carcass was literally black with crows. Kakakew and his Ethiopic horde of scavengers had descended in a cloud, and they were tearing and fighting and beating their wings about Ahtik as if all of them had gone mad. ”

“ He had lost his fearless and blatant contempt for winged creatures—he had learned that the earth was not made for him alone, and that to hold his small place on it he must fight as Maheegun and the owls had fought.
This was because in Brimstone's veins there was the red fighting-blood of a long line of ancestors that reached back to the wolves. In Neewa the process of deduction was vastly different. His breed was not a fighting breed, except as it fought among its own kind. It did not make a habit of preying upon other beasts, and no other beast preyed upon it. ”

“ TO Neewa and Brimstone—and especially to the the son of Hela—the grim combat had widened even more that subtle and growing comprehension of the world as it existed for them. It was the unforgettable wisdom of experience backed by an age-old instinct and the heredity of breed. They had killed small things, Neewa his bugs or his frogs and his bumblebees, and Brimstone his rabbits; they had fought for their lives ”

“ 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” as Neewa and Brimstone had. 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, the white man, kill Neewa's mother, the big black bear ”

“ This was purely an accident of birth—the fact that no other creature in all his wide domain was powerful enough, either alone or in groups, to defeat a grown black bear in open battle. Therefore Neewa learned nothing of fighting in the tragedy of Maheegun and the owls. His profit, if any, was in a greater caution. And his chief interest was in the fact that Maheegun and the two owls had not devoured the young bull. ”

“ They do the thing no other writer has attempted: they show us the humor of life in the wild. The romance and the adventure of the life, too, of course; but it's the good humor in these stories that “got” us so strongly. ”