he guardianship of Kazan's presence. She heard the clucking
sound of a spruce hen in the bush a few yards away, and now that sound
came to her as if from out of another world. A ground-mouse rustled
through the grass close to her forepaws, and she snapped at it, and
closed her teeth on a rock. The muscles of her shoulders twitched
tremulously and she shivered as if stricken by intense cold. She was
terrified by the darkness that shut out the world from her, and she
pawed at her closed eyes, as if she might open them to light. Early in
the afternoon she wandered back on the plain. It was different. It
frightened her, and soon she returned to the beach, and snuggled down
under the tree where Kazan had lain. She was not so frightened here. The
smell of Kazan was strong about her. For an hour she lay motionless,
with her head resting on the club clotted with his hair and blood. Night
found her still there. And when the moon and the stars came out she
crawled back into the pit in the white sand that Kazan's body had made
under the tree.

With dawn she went down to the edge of the stream to drink. She could
not see that the day was almost as dark as night, and that the
gray-black sky was a chaos of slumbering storm. But she could smell the
presence of it in the thick air, and could _feel_ the forked flashes of
lightning that rolled up with the dense pall from the south and west.
The distant rumbling of thunder grew louder, and she huddled herself
again under the tree. For hours the storm crashed over her, and the rain
fell in a deluge. When it had finished she slunk out from her shelter
like a thing beaten. Vainly she sought for one last scent of Kazan. The
club was washed clean. Again the sand was white where Kazan's blood had
reddened it. Even under the tree there was no sign of him left.

Until now only the terror of being alone in the pit of darkness that
enveloped her had oppressed Gray Wolf. With afternoon came hunger. It
was this hunger that drew her from the sand-bar, and she wandered back
into the plain. A dozen times she scented game, and each time it evaded
her. Even a ground-mouse that she cornered under a root, and dug out
with her paws, escaped her fangs.

Thirty-six hours before this Kazan and Gray Wolf had left a half of
their last kill a mile of two farther back on the plain. The kill was
one of the big barren rabbits, and Gray Wolf turned in its direction.
She did not require sight to find it. In her was d