t she had heard the rattle of Sandy
McTrigger's paddle against the side of his canoe a quarter of a mile
away. Scent had followed swiftly. Five minutes after her warning howl
Kazan stood at her side, his head flung up, his jaws open and panting.
Sandy had hunted Arctic foxes, and he was using the Eskimo tactics now,
swinging in a half-circle until he should come up in the face of the
wind. Kazan caught a single whiff of the man-tainted air and his spine
grew stiff. But blind Gray Wolf was keener than the little red-eyed fox
of the North. Her pointed nose slowly followed Sandy's progress. She
heard a dry stick crack under his feet three hundred yards away. She
caught the metallic click of his gun-barrel as it struck a birch
sapling. The moment she lost Sandy in the wind she whined and rubbed
herself against Kazan and trotted a few steps to the southwest.

At times such as this Kazan seldom refused to take guidance from her.
They trotted away side by side and by the time Sandy was creeping up
snake-like with the wind in his face, Kazan was peering from the fringe
of river brush down upon the canoe on the white strip of sand. When
Sandy returned, after an hour of futile stalking, two fresh tracks led
straight down to the canoe. He looked at them in amazement and then a
sinister grin wrinkled his ugly face. He chuckled as he went to his kit
and dug out a small rubber bag. From this he drew a tightly corked
bottle, filled with gelatine capsules. In each little capsule were five
grains of strychnine. There were dark hints that once upon a time Sandy
McTrigger had tried one of these capsules by dropping it in a cup of
coffee and giving it to a man, but the police had never proved it. He
was expert in the use of poison. Probably he had killed a thousand foxes
in his time, and he chuckled again as he counted out a dozen of the
capsules and thought how easy it would be to get this inquisitive pair
of wolves. Two or three days before he had killed a caribou, and each of
the capsules he now rolled up in a little ball of deer fat, doing the
work with short sticks in place of his fingers, so that there would be
no man-smell clinging to the death-baits. Before sundown Sandy set out
at right-angles over the plain, planting the baits. Most of them he hung
to low bushes. Others he dropped in worn rabbit and caribou trails. Then
he returned to the creek and cooked his supper.

Then next morning he was up early, and off to the poison baits