he-wolf in the
trap. He raised his rifle and soon the struggling stopped.

The wolver read the trail and the signs about, and remembering those he
had read before, he divined that this was the Wolf with the great
Cub--the She-wolf of Sentinel Butte.

Duskymane heard the "crack" as he scurried off into cover. He could
scarcely know what it meant, but he never saw his kind old
foster-mother again. Thenceforth he must face the world alone.

VII

THE YOUNG WOLF WINS A PLACE AND FAME

Instinct is no doubt a Wolf's first and best guide, but gifted parents
are a great start in life. The dusky-maned cub had had a mother of rare
excellence and he reaped the advantage of all her cleverness. He had
inherited an exquisite nose and had absolute confidence in its
admonitions. Mankind has difficulty in recognizing the power of
nostrils. A Gray-wolf can glance over the morning wind as a man does
over his newspaper, and get all the latest news. He can swing over the
ground and have the minutest information of every living creature that
has walked there within many hours. His nose even tells which way it
ran, and in a word renders a statement of every animal that recently
crossed his trail, whence it came, and whither it went.

That power had Duskymane in the highest degree; his broad, moist nose
was evidence of it to all who are judges of such things. Added to this,
his frame was of unusual power and endurance, and last, he had early
learned a deep distrust of everything strange, and, call it what we
will, shyness, wariness or suspicion, it was worth more to him than all
his cleverness. It was this as much as his physical powers that made a
success of his life. Might is right in wolf-land, and Duskymane and his
mother had been driven out of Sentinel Butte. But it was a very
delectable land and he kept drifting back to his native mountain. One
or two big Wolves there resented his coming. They drove him off several
times, yet each time he returned he was better able to face them; and
before he was eighteen months old he had defeated all rivals and
established himself again on his native ground; where he lived like a
robber baron, levying tribute on the rich lands about him and finding
safety in the rocky fastness.

Wolver Ryder often hunted in that country, and before long, he came
across a five-and-one-half-inch track, the foot-print of a giant Wolf.
Roughly reckoned, twenty to twenty-five pounds of weight or six inches
of sta