suddenly been stricken into foaming
maniacs. Breed turned on the first rise of the hills and howled. The
members of the coyote pack read the message. Breed was bidding farewell
to the land of sage. Perhaps he knew that he would never see the gray
foothills again.

Six pairs of coyotes gathered toward his cry. They had seen much and
lived to pass their knowledge on. Every one of them had run the gauntlet
of rifle fire; they had been hounded by dogs. Most of them had been
maimed by traps,--and now this affliction that turned coyotes mad with a
single bite of meat.

They followed Breed back into the hills, a wise band, the pick of the
coyote tribe and well able to cope with new conditions and teach their
future pups the work of pioneering in strange countries which lay ahead
of them.

CHAPTER VIII

Breed found the hills buried deep under a blanket of snow. In the low
country the drifts lay only in the gulches and the more sheltered spots
but up in the lodgepole valleys and the heavy stands of spruce on the
slopes the white covering seemed endless and unbroken. The dogs killed
the meat for the whole pack, for at this season the she-coyotes were
unfitted for the strenuous work of pulling down heavy game. For the same
reason they were unable to travel long distances in the snow. Breed too
was disinclined to move rapidly. His foot had healed but the swollen leg
was weak and tender. The pack averaged less than twenty miles a day.

At the end of a week Breed's old home was more than a hundred miles
behind and he was well up in the backbone of the hills. He came out upon
a mighty divide and gazed off across a rolling country extending fifty
miles each way, all of it high but ringed in by still more lofty ranges,
their ragged saw-teeth standing gaunt and grim against the sky. There
were broad, open meadows spread out before him, great areas devoid of
trees, intersected by timbered ridges and rolling parks where the stand
of spruce was dotted. The whole of it lay under a four-foot layer of
snow and gleamed dead white and lusterless, but even so its aspect was
more inviting than the gloomy forest through which they had come.

The open-loving coyotes elected to remain in this land rather than
penetrate the questionable beyond. As they crossed the open spaces the
racy smell of the sage leaked through the packed drifts underfoot and
they knew that parts of these valleys were carpeted with the same brush
that clothed the