out of a sound sleep, certain that somewhere close
at hand a coyote had howled. During the brief gray light of the
following day Collins stopped and gazed long at a small, wolf-like track
in the snow.

"Coyote!" he announced triumphantly. "It was him that howled."

Twenty yards farther on he crossed a second coyote track, and for half a
mile there were trails pointing to the north. There was one that showed
evidence of a missing foot, a peg-leg such as those he had often seen on
the open range. Then Collins halted and studied the next two trails that
appeared side by side. One was a wolf track, and there were two toes
missing from one hind foot. The smaller tracks were evenly spaced, and
placed one before the other in a straight line after the manner of
coyote and wolf, but ten feet beyond where Collins stood the trail
showed the wavering gait of the dog with an occasional track out to
either side. A sudden mist blurred Collins' eyes and he dashed it off
with the back of his mitts.

"It's Shady," he said. "Old Shady and that yellow Breed,--both still
alive and way off up here." Collins threw back his head and sent forth
the clear piercing whistle that he had used to summon Shady in the long
ago. Three times the shrill blast, long and sustained, was sent far out
across the snowy hills.

Three miles to the north Shady lay curled up with Breed. She suddenly
raised her head. Breed too opened his eyes and cocked one ear to listen.
Shady was conscious of no actual sound. Some faint vibration reached her
ears and seemed to play upon some chord deep within; the impressions
were hazy and indistinct, yet she was aware of a vague sense of loss, a
wave of something akin to homesickness, and she whimpered softly, then
closed her eyes and slept.

Collins heard more and more coyotes howl, and in the next two months he
had brief glimpses of perhaps a dozen as they moved across some opening.
At least half of these seemed larger than the coyotes he had known, and
they had dark fur on their backs. The Coyote Prophet studied long over
these strange things. The coyote voices roused an ache for the homely
cabin in Sand Coulee Basin a thousand miles to the south; and each time
one howled he said:

"I'm going back. Once it comes spring I'll make tracks out of here. This
here's no fit country for a white man, and me--I'm going back."

But Collins did not go back with the opening up of spring. Rumors of a
gold strike sent men stampeding