sand. All that day he searched for her along the river
and out on the plain. He went to where they had killed their last
rabbit. He sniffed at the bushes where the poison baits had hung. Again
and again he sat back on his haunches and sent out his mating cry to
her. And slowly, as he did these things, nature was working in him that
miracle of the wild which the Crees have named the "spirit call." As it
had worked in Gray Wolf, so now it stirred the blood of Kazan. With the
going of the sun, and the sweeping about him of shadowy night, he turned
more and more to the south and east. His whole world was made up of the
trails over which he had hunted. Beyond those places he did not know
that there was such a thing as existence. And in that world, small in
his understanding of things, was Gray Wolf. He could not miss her. That
world, in his comprehension of it, ran from the McFarlane in a narrow
trail through the forests and over the plains to the little valley from
which the beavers had driven them. If Gray Wolf was not here--she was
there, and tirelessly he resumed his quest of her.

Not until the stars were fading out of the sky again, and gray day was
giving place to night, did exhaustion and hunger stop him. He killed a
rabbit, and for hours after he had feasted he lay close to his kill, and
slept. Then he went on.

The fourth night he came to the little valley between the two ridges,
and under the stars, more brilliant now in the chill clearness of the
early autumn nights, he followed the creek down into their old swamp
home. It was broad day when he reached the edge of the great beaver pond
that now completely surrounded the windfall under which Gray-Wolf's
second-born had come into the world. Broken Tooth and the other beavers
had wrought a big change in what had once been his home and Gray Wolf's,
and for many minutes Kazan stood silent and motionless at the edge of
the pond, sniffing the air heavy with the unpleasant odor of the
usurpers. Until now his spirit had remained unbroken. Footsore, with
thinned sides and gaunt head, he circled slowly through the swamp. All
that day he searched. And his crest lay flat now, and there was a hunted
look in the droop of his shoulders and in the shifting look of his
eyes. Gray Wolf was gone.

Slowly nature was impinging that fact upon him. She had passed out of
his world and out of his life, and he was filled with a loneliness and a
grief so great that the forest seemed stra