yelping curs of the settlement! Her
bristling hairs smoothed themselves, the skin of her jaws relaxed and
set itself about her teeth in a totally different expression; her
growling ceased, and she gave an amicable whine. Diffidently the two
approached each other, and in a few minutes a perfect understanding
was established.

That night they hunted sheep together. In the joy of comradeship and
emulation, prudence was scattered to the winds, and they held a riot
of slaughter. When day broke a dozen or more sheep lay dead about the
pastures. And the wolf, knowing that men and dogs would soon be noisy
on their trail, led his new-found mate far back into the wilderness.

III.

The tall bitch, hating the settlement and all the folk therein, was
glad to be quit of it. And she found the hunting of deer far more
thrilling than the tame pursuit of sheep. Slipping with curious ease
the inherited sympathies of her kind, she fell into the ways of the
wild kindred, save for a certain brusque openness which she never
succeeded in laying off.

For weeks the strangely mated pair drifted southward through the
bright New Brunswick spring, to come to a halt at last in a region to
their liking between the St. John and the Chiputneticook chain of
lakes. It was a land of deer and rabbits and ducks, with settlements
small and widely scattered; a land where never a wolf-snout had been
seen for half a hundred years. And here, on a thick-wooded hill-slope,
the wanderers found a dry cave and made it their den.

In due course the long-jawed bitch bore a litter of six sturdy whelps,
which throve amazingly. As they grew up they showed almost all wolf,
harking back to the type--save that in colour they were nearly black,
with a touch of tan in the gray of their under parts. When they came
to maturity, and were accredited hunters all, they were in general
larger and more savage than either of their parents, differing more
widely, one from another, than would the like number of full-blooded
wolves. The eight, when they hunted together, made a pack which, for
strength, ferocity, and craft, no like number of full-blooded wolves
in all Canada could have matched.

The long-jawed bitch, whose highly developed brain guided, for the
most part, the destinies of the pack, for a time kept them from the
settlement and away from the contact with men; and the existence of
wolves in the Chiputneticook country was not dreamed of among the
backwoods settleme