tself--the law of the
pack--he does not presume to defy. He will fight--to justify his
blood, and, perhaps, to drug his despair and die in the heat of the
struggle. But he does not dream of trying to escape.

And in this fashion, fighting in silence, this dark wolf would have
died at the brink of the river bluff, and been eaten by his fellows
ere they continued their chase of the leaping buck--in this fashion
would he have died, but for that extra breadth of skull between the
eyes, that heightened individualism and resourcefulness. Had there
been any chance to escape by fighting, fighting would have been the
choice of his fierce and hardy spirit. But what was he against six?

Defying the fiery anguish in his foot, he made a desperate leap which
took him to the extreme overhanging edge of the bluff. Already the
jaws of the executioners were gnashing at his heels. A second more and
they would have been at his throat. But before that second passed he
was in mid-air, his legs spread wide like those of a squirrel, falling
to the ice-cakes of the swollen river. From the brink above, the grim
eyes of the baffled pack flamed down upon him for an instant, and then
withdrew. What was a drowned wolf, when there was a winded buck not
far ahead?

But the black-shouldered wolf was not drowned. The flood was thick,
indeed, with crunching ice-cakes and wallowing logs and slowly turning
islets of uprooted trees and the _debris_ of the winter forest. But
fortune so favoured the wolf that he fell in a space of clear water,
instead of being dashed to a pulp on ice-cake or tree trunk. He
disappeared, came to the surface gasping, struck out hardily through
the grim and daunting turmoil, and succeeded in gaining one of those
islets of toughly interlaced _debris_ which turned slowly in the
flood. Upon this precarious refuge, crouched shivering on the largest
tree root and licking persistently at his wounded paw, he was carried
swiftly down-stream through the roar of waters.

II.

When the lopsided moon, now hung high over a low, desolate shore of
blanched rampikes, was fading to a papery whiteness against a sky of
dawn, the roar of the river grew louder, and the islet, no longer
slowly revolving, plunged forward, through a succession of wallowing
waves, over a wild half-mile of ledges, and joined itself to a wider
and mightier stream. The wolf, drenched, shivering, and appalled by
the tumult, clung to his refuge by tooth and claw; and