the islet,
being well compacted, held together through the wrenching plunges, and
carried its burden safely forth upon the quiet current.

For a day and a night and a day the starving wolf voyaged down the
flood, till his gaunt sides clung together, and a fierce ache gnawed
at his vitals. But with the fasting and the ceaseless soothing of his
tongue his wound rapidly healed; and when, after sunset of his second
evening on the river, the islet grounded in an eddy under the bank, he
sprang ashore with speed little impaired. Only a limp and an ache
remained to remind him of the hurt which had so nearly cost him his
life and had exiled him to untried hunting-grounds.

His feet once more on firm ground, the wolf halted warily. The air
that came down the bank carried a strange and warning scent.
Noiselessly he crept up the steep, went through a few yards of
shrubbery like a ghost, and peered forth upon a rough back-settlement
road. At one side he saw a cabin, with a barn near it, and two
long-horned steers (he had seen steers at a lumber camp in his own
wild land), thrusting their muzzles over the fence. Down the road
toward the cabin came a man, in gray homespun and cowhide larrigans,
with an axe over his shoulder. It was the man-smell which had made the
wolf so cautious.

With savage but curious eyes he watched the man, with no thought of
attacking alone so redoubtable a foe. Presently the latter began to
whistle, and at the incomprehensible sound the wolf shrank back, fear
mingled with his curiosity. But when the man was well past, there came
a new scent upon the air, a scent quite unknown to him; and then a
small black and white cur trotted into view, nosing along the roadside
in quest of chipmunks. The jaws of the starving wolf dripped water at
the sight. He gathered himself for a rush. He saw that the man had
disappeared. The dog ran across the road, sniffing a new chipmunk
trail, and halted, in sudden apprehension, not five feet from the
hidden wolf. There was a rustle, a leap, a sharp yelp; and the wolf
was back into cover with his prey.

Emboldened by the success of this, his first hunting in the unknown
land, the wolf slept for a few hours in his bushy retreat, and then,
when the misshapen moon was up, went prowling cautiously around the
outskirts of the scattered little settlement. Everywhere the man-smell
kept him on his guard. Once he was careless enough to get between the
wind and a farmyard, whereupon a wa