n, with a sudden sharp click of his jaws, he
stopped like a shot in his tracks.

At last it had come--the meeting with that for which he had been
seeking. It was in a clearing, lighted by the cold dawn--a tiny
amphitheater that lay on the side of a ridge, facing the east. With her
head toward him, and waiting for him as he came out of the shadows, his
scent strong in her keen nose, stood Maheegun, the young wolf. Baree
had not smelled her, but he saw her directly he came out of the rim of
young balsams that fringed the clearing. It was then that he stopped,
and for a full minute neither of them moved a muscle or seemed to
breathe.

There was not a fortnight's difference in their age and yet Maheegun
was much the smaller of the two. Her body was as long, but she was
slimmer; she stood on slender legs that were almost like the legs of a
fox, and the curve of her back was that of a slightly bent bow, a sign
of swiftness almost equal to the wind. She stood poised for flight even
as Baree advanced his first step toward her, and then very slowly her
body relaxed, and in a direct ratio as he drew nearer her ears lost
their alertness and dropped aslant.

Baree whined. His own ears were up, his head alert, his tail aloft and
bushy. Cleverness, if not strategy, had already become a part of his
masculine superiority, and he did not immediately press the affair. He
was within five feet of Maheegun when he casually turned away from her
and faced the east, where a faint penciling of red and gold was
heralding the day. For a few moments he sniffed and looked around and
pointed the wind with much seriousness, as though impressing on his
fair acquaintance--as many a two-legged animal has done before him--his
tremendous importance in the world at large.

And Maheegun was properly impressed. Baree's bluff worked as
beautifully as the bluffs of the two-legged animals. He sniffed the air
with such thrilling and suspicious zeal that Maheegun's ears sprang
alert, and she sniffed it with him. He turned his head from point to
point so sharply and alertly that her feminine curiosity, if not
anxiety, made her turn her own head in questioning conjunction. And
when he whined, as though in the air he had caught a mystery which she
could not possibly understand, a responsive note gathered in her
throat, but smothered and low as a woman's exclamation when she is not
quite sure whether she should interrupt her lord or not. At this sound,
which Bar