t. When the last Squaw, weary of the blood toil, curled
beneath her blanket, A'tim crept to the meat piles. All the
energy of his rested stomach urged him to the feasting; there was
no stint.

Surely no Swift-runner, Dog or Wolf, ever had such a choosing.
The Pack-Dogs kept the Wolves at bay, but with A'tim was the
scent of their own kind, the Dog scent. He was not an utter
stranger to them, only an Outcast; they tolerated him as a beggar
at the meat store of which they had more than enough.

At last the hunger pain was all gone. Once in his Train-Dog days
he had looted a cache of White Fish, and eaten until he could eat
no more; it was like that now. Then, with a Dog thought for the
morrow, he stole four huge pieces of choice meat, and cached them
in the little coulee where waited Shag.

"Ah! you've come back, Brother," said the Bull, as A'tim crept
complacently to his side. "I was afraid something might have
happened to you, for hunger often carries us into unknown
danger."

"E-u-h-h! but it was a mighty Kill, Shag. Such flesh I've never
tasted--never--tasted--" He was asleep.

"I wonder what makes the moon red," muttered Shag, drowsily, as
he, too, nodded off to sleep.

Then again the two Outcasts, the one for whom the blood horror
had colored the moon red, and the other with a new joy of meat
fullness, slumbered together in the little coulee by the Buffalo
Pound.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER THREE

Shag was the first to awaken; the night's banquet caused the
morning to come slowly to A'tim.

The pulling cut of Shag's heavy jaws on the crisp grass awoke the
Dog-Wolf. He yawned heavily, and eyed the old Bull with sleepy
indifference. Ghur-h-h-h! what a plaintive figure the aged
Buffalo was, to be sure.

"Good-morning, Brother," whuffed Shag, his mouth full of grass;
"where are you going?"

"I _cached_ a piece of the new meat here last night," answered
A'tim, as he nosed under an overhanging cut-bank. "Forest
thieves!" he ejaculated angrily; "the Gray Stealers of Things
have taken it." His _cache_ was as bare as Mother Hubbard's
cupboard--not even a bone; there was nothing but the reddened
stones where the meat had lain, and a foul odor of Wolf.
Impetuously he rushed to the second _cache_; it, too, was void of
all meat; the third _cache_ held nothing but the footprints of
his gray half-brothers, the Wolf Thieves.

Despair crept into the heart of A'tim; what use to explore the