the climax in the first chapter of Baree's education.
It was as if Gray Wolf and Kazan had planned it all out, so that he
might receive his first instruction in the art of killing. When Kazan
had dropped it, Baree approached the big hare cautiously. The back of
Wapoos, the rabbit, was broken. His round eyes were glazed, and he had
ceased to feel pain. But to Baree, as he dug his tiny teeth into the
heavy fur under Wapoos's throat, the hare was very much alive. The
teeth did not go through into the flesh. With puppyish fierceness Baree
hung on. He thought that he was killing. He could feel the dying
convulsions of Wapoos. He could hear the last gasping breaths leaving
the warm body, and he snarled and tugged until finally he fell back
with a mouthful of fur. When he returned to the attack, Wapoos was
quite dead, and Baree continued to bite and snarl until Gray Wolf came
with her sharp fangs and tore the rabbit to pieces. After that followed
the feast.

So Baree came to understand that to eat meant to kill, and as other
days and nights passed, there grew in him swiftly the hunger for flesh.
In this he was the true wolf. From Kazan he had taken other and
stronger inheritances of the dog. He was magnificently black, which in
later days gave him the name of Kusketa Mohekun--the black wolf. On his
breast was a white star. His right ear was tipped with white. His tail,
at six weeks, was bushy and hung low. It was a wolf's tail. His ears
were Gray Wolf's ears--sharp, short, pointed, always alert. His
foreshoulders gave promise of being splendidly like Kazan's, and when
he stood up he was like the trace dog, except that he always stood
sidewise to the point or object he was watching. This, again, was the
wolf, for a dog faces the direction in which he is looking intently.

One brilliant night, when Baree was two months old, and when the sky
was filled with stars and a June moon so bright that it seemed scarcely
higher than the tall spruce tops, Baree settled back on his haunches
and howled. It was a first effort. But there was no mistake in the note
of it. It was the wolf howl. But a moment later when Baree slunk up to
Kazan, as if deeply ashamed of his effort, he was wagging his tail in
an unmistakably apologetic manner. And this again was the dog. If
Tusoo, the dead Indian trapper, could have seen him then, he would have
judged him by that wagging of his tail. It revealed the fact that deep
in his heart--and in his soul, if