se note came from some dog beast that
belonged to man.

A lone prospector had built his cabin on the west slope of the
Kootenais, and hereafter Breed avoided this vicinity.

When the pups were six weeks old Shady felt the call to help Breed
rustle food and she hunted by herself in the neighborhood of the den,
but her earnest efforts were unavailing, as there was no small game and
she was unable to stalk a deer.

[Illustration: Breed was compelled to hunt farther from home as the deer
quit the valleys. _Page 191._]

Breed was compelled to hunt farther from home as the deer quit the
valleys to descend to the foothills for the first nips of green grass.
One morning, when far south of the den, he heard again the note of the
hound. It rose and fell, an eager bellow that moved slowly through the
hills, and Breed did not like the music. This same baying reached him on
three other days. The reason for all this uproar was beyond his
comprehension, but from the fact that it came from a dog he knew that it
meant no good for the wild things.

A few days after he first heard this strange sound he came face to face
with a pair of coyotes that had run with his pack. Their air was one of
dejection and there was no springiness in their gait. From their
dispirited manner Breed knew that tragedy had overtaken his friends,
that some calamity had befallen their pups. Later he met a second pair,
a dog coyote and a she-wolf, and they too were traveling aimlessly,
their family torn from them. But Breed had no way of linking these
disasters with the music of the trail hound. The prospector kept a
single hound and when he found a fresh wolf kill in the spring he put
the dog on the tracks that led from it, keeping him in leash, and the
hound led him to the den. He had found good hunting near his cabin this
spring, as the hills were full of the dens of the small yellow wolves
that had turned up in such numbers the preceding winter, but his
activities so far had been confined to the country that lay south of
Breed's range.

Breed led the pups forth for a few short trips as their strength
increased. In his hunts toward the south he frequently crossed the
trails of other coyotes that had led their offspring out for a ramble.
At least one out of every three families were breeds, and the pups were
uniform. They were heavier than coyotes and their backstrips were dark;
but their language was pure coyote, their voices perhaps slightly deeper
and