ive ears and dilating nostrils held
high to catch the faintest waft of air. Not a sound came to him,
except the calling of the waters; not a scent, save the raw freshness
of melting snow and the balsamic tang of buds just beginning to thrill
to the first of the rising sap. He bounded on again for perhaps a
hundred yards, then with a tremendous leap sprang to one side, a full
thirty feet, landing belly-deep in a thicket of scrub juniper. Another
leap, as if he were propelled by steel springs, carried him yet
another thirty feet aside. Then he turned, ran back a couple of
hundred yards parallel to his old trail, and lay down in a dense
covert of spruces to catch breath and ease his pounding heart. He was
a very young buck, not yet seasoned in the craft of the wilderness,
and his terror shook him. But he knew enough to take his snatched rest
at the very edge of his covert, where his eyes could watch the back
trail. For a quarter of an hour, however, nothing appeared along that
staring trail. Then he got up nervously and resumed his flight, still
ascending the valley, but now slanting away from the river, and
gradually climbing back toward the crest of the ridge. He had in mind
a wide reach of swales and flooded meadows, still miles away, wherein
he might hope to elude the doom that followed him.

Not long after the buck had vanished there arose a strange sound upon
the still, wet air. It came in a rising and falling cadence from far
behind the ridge, under the lopsided moon. It was a high, confused
sound, not unmusical, but terrifying--a cry of many voices. It drifted
up into the silvery night, wavered and diminished, swelled again, and
then died away, leaving a sense of fear upon the quiet that followed.
The soft clamour of the waters, when one noticed them again, seemed to
have taken a new note from the menace of that cadenced cry.

Presently over the top of the ridge, at the gap wherein had first
appeared the form of the leaping buck, a low, dark shape came, moving
sinuously and with deadly swiftness. It did not bound into the air and
float, as the buck had seemed to do, but slid smoothly, like a small,
dense patch of cloud-shadow--a direct, inevitable movement, wasting no
force and fairly eating up the trail of the fleeing deer.

As it came down the slope, disappearing in the hemlock groves and
emerging upon the bright, snowy hollows, the dread shape resolved
itself into a pack of seven wolves. They ran so close, so