in the trees to see him. But
they stood with the angry glare revealing a strange and sinister
intentness in their drawn faces and ominous speculations in their evil
eyes.

XLI

It was a wilderness moon that rose over the spruce to-night,--white as
new silver, incredibly large, inscrutably mysterious. The winds had
whisked away the last pale cloud that might have dimmed its glory, and
its light poured down with equal bounty on peak and hill, forest and
yellow marsh. The heavy woods partook most deeply of its enchantment:
tall, stately trees pale and nebulous as if with silver frost, each
little stream dancing and shimmering in its light, every glade laid with
a fairy tapestry, every shadow dreadful and black in contrast. The
wilderness breathed and shivered as if swept with passion.

The wilderness moon is the moon of desire; and all this great space of
silence seemed to respond. It seemed to throb, like one living entity,
as if in longing for something lost long ago--a half-forgotten
happiness, a glory and a triumph that were gone never to return. No
creatures that followed the woods trails were dull and flat to-night.
They were all swept with mystery, knowing vague longings or fierce
desires. It was the harvest moon; but here it did not light the fields
so that men might harvest grain. Rather it illumined the hunting trails
so that the beasts of prey might find relief from the wild lusts and
seething ferment that was in their veins. But mostly the forest mood was
disconsolate, rather than savage, to-night. The wild geese on the lake
called their weird and plaintive cries, their strange complaints that no
man understands; the loons laughed in insane despair; and the coyotes
on the ridge wailed out the pain of living and the vague longings of
their wild hearts.

In the glory of that moon Fenris the wolf knew the same, resistless
longings that so many times before had turned him from the game trails.
There was something here that was unutterably dear to him,--something
that drew him, called him like a voice, and he could not turn aside.
Because he was a beast, he likely did not know the force that was
drawing him again along the lake shore. Yet the souls of the lower
creatures no man knows; and perhaps he had conscious longings,
profoundly intense, for a moment's touch of a strong hand on his
shoulder,--one never-to-be-forgotten caress from a certain god that had
gone to a cave to live. It was true that his wil