pairs dropping out to den till at last only Peg and Fluff were left.

When the chinook set in Fluff chose a den site and stopped. Breed held
on for another five miles, then Shady refused to travel. She picked her
own site and showed a keener interest in home building than she had the
season past, working short shifts to relay Breed on the digging, and the
three tunnels that led to this new nest hole were longer and more
elaborately curved and twisted than those of the old den on the
Yellowstone. The last day of February seven pups came to share the den
with Shady.

The rest of the pack had denned to the south and few encroached on
Breed's hunting territory. Deer were still plentiful, even after a
winter of hard hunting, and he found little difficulty in supplying
meat. There was but one flaw in his contentment.

One day when the pups were a month old and had recently been out for
their first romp Breed hunted across the divide and down the western
slope of the Kootenais. He stood on a ridge in the gathering dusk when
he was suddenly aware that other hunters were abroad before him. His eye
caught flashes of white through the green of the spruce on the opposite
slope. He knew that a band of deer had been startled to sudden flight,
that the jerky gleams of white were the brief exposures of the
underparts of their tails as they were upflung in hurdling windfalls.
The wind was wrong and Breed could not catch the scent. He traced their
course through the timber by their white flags and saw three deer break
cover and start out across a long narrow opening on the slope, the path
of a snowslide that had stripped a lane through the trees on the steep
side hill, its trail a clean split in the solid green of the spruce. In
the center of the slide the lead deer suddenly collapsed and the sharp
report of a rifle rolled across the hills.

At the sound of the shot Breed heard a few deep-chested dog notes half a
mile down the narrow valley. He looked that way and saw a slender tongue
of smoke curling lazily above the trees around a bend. The deep note was
strange to him, but again the association of ideas came to his aid.
Shady's occasional fits of barking and her strange ways; the wolf hounds
that had belonged to men and had chased him in Sand Coulee Basin; this
note that rose in answer to a rifle shot and came from near the smoke
that denoted a cabin. Breed himself was unconscious of assorting these
ideas, but he knew that the hoar