reek held a
new meaning for them now and as they traveled they sniffed its odors and
listened to its sounds with an interest they had never known before. It
was an interest mingled a little with fear, for something in the manner
in which the beavers had beaten them reminded Kazan and Gray Wolf of
_man_. And that night, when in the radiance of the big white moon they
came within scent of the beaver colony that Broken Tooth had left, they
turned quickly northward into the plains. Thus had brave old Broken
Tooth taught them to respect the flesh and blood and handiwork of his
tribe.

CHAPTER XXI

A SHOT ON THE SAND-BAR

July and August of 1911 were months of great fires in the Northland. The
swamp home of Kazan and Gray Wolf, and the green valley between the two
ridges, had escaped the seas of devastating flame; but now, as they set
forth on their wandering adventures again, it was not long before their
padded feet came in contact with the seared and blackened desolation
that had followed so closely after the plague and starvation of the
preceding winter. In his humiliation and defeat, after being driven from
his swamp home by the beavers, Kazan led his blind mate first into the
south. Twenty miles beyond the ridge they struck the fire-killed
forests. Winds from Hudson's Bay had driven the flames in an unbroken
sea into the west, and they had left not a vestige of life or a patch of
green. Blind Gray Wolf could not see the blackened world, but she
_sensed_ it. It recalled to her memory of that other fire, after the
battle on the Sun Rock; and all of her wonderful instincts, sharpened
and developed by her blindness, told her that to the north--and not
south--lay the hunting-grounds they were seeking. The strain of dog that
was in Kazan still pulled him south. It was not because he sought man,
for to man he had now become as deadly an enemy as Gray Wolf herself. It
was simply dog instinct to travel southward; in the face of fire it was
wolf instinct to travel northward. At the end of the third day Gray Wolf
won. They recrossed the little valley between the two ridges, and swung
north and west into the Athabasca country, striking a course that would
ultimately bring them to the headwaters of the McFarlane River.

Late in the preceding autumn a prospector had come up to Fort Smith, on
the Slave River, with a pickle bottle filled with gold dust and nuggets.
He had made the find on the McFarlane. The first mails had t