ragged in by human hands before his eyes. It was the
blood of the chase!

A flashing memory of his captors turned the animal's head for an instant
in backward inspection. They were gone. He could neither hear nor see
them. He sniffed the sign of human presence, but that sign was always
with him, and was not disturbing. The blood held him--and the strange
scent, the game scent--that was coming to him more clearly every
instant.

He crunched about cautiously in the snow. He found other spots of blood,
and to the watchers there came a low long whine that seemed about to end
in the wolf song. The blood trails were leading him away toward the game
scent, and he tugged viciously at the babeesh that held him captive,
gnawing at it vainly, like an angry dog, forgetting what experience had
taught him many times before. Each moment added to his excitement He ran
about the sapling, gulped mouthfuls of the bloody snow, and each time he
paused for a moment with his open dripping jaws held toward the dead
buck on the rock. The game was very near. Brute sense told him that. Oh,
the longing that was in him, the twitching, quivering longing to
kill--kill--kill!

He made another effort, tore up the snow in his frantic endeavors to
free himself, to break loose, to follow in the wild glad cry of freed
savagery in the calling of his people. He failed again, panting, whining
in piteous helplessness.

Then he settled upon his haunches at the end of his babeesh thong.

For a moment his head turned to the moonlit sky, his long nose poised at
right angles to the bristling hollows between his shoulders.

There came then a low, whining wail, like the beginning of the
"death-song" of a husky dog--a wail that grew in length and in strength
and in volume until it rose weirdly among the mountains and swept far
out over the plains--the hunt call of the wolf on the trail, which calls
to him the famished, gray-gaunt outlaws of the wilderness, as the
bugler's notes call his fellows on the field of battle.

Three times that blood-thrilling cry went up from the captive wolf's
throat, and before those cries had died away the three hunters were
perched upon their platforms among the spruce.

There followed now the ominous, waiting silence of an awakened
wilderness. Rod could hear his heart throbbing within him. He forgot the
intense cold. His nerves tingled. He looked out over the endless plains,
white and mysteriously beautiful as they lay bathed in