s drooped. The scent of game would
have made her rigid and alert. But it was not the game smell. It was
human, and Gray Wolf slunk behind Kazan and whined. For several minutes
they stood without moving or making a sound, and then Kazan led the way
on. Less than three hundred yards away they came to a thick clump of
scrub spruce, and almost ran into a snow-smothered tepee. It was
abandoned. Life and fire had not been there for a long time. But from
the tepee had come the man-smell. With legs rigid and his spine
quivering Kazan approached the opening to the tepee. He looked in. In
the middle of the tepee, lying on the charred embers of a fire, lay a
ragged blanket--and in the blanket was wrapped the body of a little
Indian child. Kazan could see the tiny moccasined feet. But so long had
death been there that he could scarcely smell the presence of it. He
drew back, and saw Gray Wolf cautiously nosing about a long and
peculiarly shaped hummock in the snow. She had traveled about it three
times, but never approaching nearer than a man could have reached with a
rifle barrel. At the end of her third circle she sat down on her
haunches, and Kazan went close to the hummock and sniffed. Under that
bulge in the snow, as well as in the tepee, there was death. They slunk
away, their ears flattened and their tails drooping until they trailed
the snow, and did not stop until they reached their swamp home. Even
there Gray Wolf still sniffed the horror of the plague, and her muscles
twitched and shivered as she lay close at Kazan's side.

That night the big white moon had around its edge a crimson rim. It
meant cold--intense cold. Always the plague came in the days of greatest
cold--the lower the temperature the more terrible its havoc. It grew
steadily colder that night, and the increased chill penetrated to the
heart of the windfall, and drew Kazan and Gray Wolf closer together.
With dawn, which came at about eight o'clock, Kazan and his blind mate
sallied forth into the day. It was fifty degrees below zero. About them
the trees cracked with reports like pistol-shots. In the thickest spruce
the partridges were humped into round balls of feathers. The snow-shoe
rabbits had burrowed deep under the snow or to the heart of the heaviest
windfalls. Kazan and Gray Wolf found few fresh trails, and after an
hour of fruitless hunting they returned to their lair. Kazan, dog-like,
had buried the half of a rabbit two or three days before, and they