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.