s white coat, which was simply a conspicuous curse
to him when there was no snow--which was one reason, maybe, why he
retired from the limelight to some lonely fastness during summer--was
an incalculable asset to him in winter, and he knew it.

He ran, with his smooth, loose, effortless lope, perhaps a quarter of a
mile, then stopped, and putting up his head, howled a howl so full of
hopeless, cruel yearning, so vibrant with desolation, that it sounded
like the cry of a soul doomed forever to seek something it could never
find. It was a lugubrious yowl there, in that setting, and it made
one's scalp creep all over one's cranium.

And instantly almost, even as the last, long, horrible echoes died,
sobbing adown the blue-haze perspective of the forest glades, the
answer came--a far-away, fluttering, wandering howl, like the moan of
the wind in its sleep.

The white wolf waited a moment, then howled again, and the ghastly
sound came back to him, louder and nearer this time.

A third time he howled, and the forest cringed under the reply.

Then at last the shadows between the ranked tree-trunks took unto
themselves life, and eyes, eyes in pairs, horribly hungry, cruel
port-holes of brains, with a glary, stary, green light behind them,
suddenly appeared everywhere, like swiftly-turned-on electric lamps.
There was a whispering rush, as if giants were swiftly dealing cards in
the silence, and--the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was away, racing
like a cloud-shadow, rapid and impetuous as a greyhound, at the head of
a pack of one hundred and twenty-nine empty-stomached wolves.

They made no sound as they tore, compact as a Zulu impi, over the
spotless white, because they had no trail to follow, only this huge
devil of a leader; and they had their work cut out to follow him, for
he was the longest-legged male wolf any of them had ever set eyes upon.

Straight as a twelve-inch shell the white wolf headed back to the
fallen trees and the bear's den. When he reached them, he stopped so
abruptly that the wolves behind him almost sat on their haunches in the
effort to pull up. Those that failed fell sideways under a rain of
wicked snaps from him, that followed one another quick as the stutter
of a machine-gun.

The pack did not stop--at least, not the flanks of it. They swept on
without a pause, out and round, like flood-water round a knoll, joined
at the far side, and--were still. As a maneuver, a military maneuver,
sw