it sympathetically, while Kazan stood
rigid and listening.

The fox swung swiftly away with the wind, warned by the sounds of
conflict. He was not a fighter, but a murderer who killed from behind,
and a little later he leaped upon an owl and tore it into bits for the
half-pound of flesh within the mass of feathers.

But nothing could drive back those little white outlaws of the
wilderness--the ermine. They would have stolen between the feet of man
to get at the warm flesh and blood of the freshly killed bull. Kazan
hunted them savagely. They were too quick for him, more like elusive
flashes in the moonlight than things of life. They burrowed under the
old bull's body and fed while he raved and filled his mouth with snow.
Gray Wolf sat placidly on her haunches. The little ermine did not
trouble her, and after a time Kazan realized this, and flung himself
down beside her, panting and exhausted.

For a long time after that the night was almost unbroken by sound. Once
in the far distance there came the cry of a wolf, and now and then, to
punctuate the deathly silence, the snow owl hooted in blood-curdling
protest from his home in the spruce-tops. The moon was straight above
the old bull when Gray Wolf scented the first real danger. Instantly she
gave the warning to Kazan and faced the bloody trail, her lithe body
quivering, her fangs gleaming in the starlight, a snarling whine in her
throat. Only in the face of their deadliest enemy, the lynx--the
terrible fighter who had blinded her long ago in that battle on the Sun
Rock!--did she give such warning as this to Kazan. He sprang ahead of
her, ready for battle even before he caught the scent of the gray
beautiful creature of death stealing over the trail.

Then came the interruption. From a mile away there burst forth a single
fierce long-drawn howl.

After all, that was the cry of the true master of the wilderness--the
wolf. It was the cry of hunger. It was the cry that sent men's blood
running more swiftly through their veins, that brought the moose and the
deer to their feet shivering in every limb--the cry that wailed like a
note of death through swamp and forest and over the snow-smothered
ridges until its faintest echoes reached for miles into the starlit
night.

There was silence, and in that awesome stillness Kazan and Gray Wolf
stood shoulder to shoulder facing the cry, and in response to that cry
there worked within them a strange and mystic change, for what