agged the snow and
his back sagging in the curious, evasive gait of the wolf, he scarcely
made himself distinguishable from the shadows of the spruce and balsams.

There was no faltering in the trail Baree made; it was straight as a
rope might have been drawn through the forest, and it brought him,
early in the dusk, to the open spot where Nepeese had fled with him
that day she had pushed McTaggart over the edge of the precipice into
the pool. In the place of the balsam shelter of that day there was now
a watertight birchbark tepee which Pierrot had helped the Willow to
make during the summer. Baree went straight to it and thrust in his
head with a low and expectant whine.

There was no answer. It was dark and cold in the tepee. He could make
out indistinctly the two blankets that were always in it, the row of
big tin boxes in which Nepeese kept their stores, and the stove which
Pierrot had improvised out of scraps of iron and heavy tin. But Nepeese
was not there. And there was no sign of her outside. The snow was
unbroken except by his own trail. It was dark when he returned to the
burned cabin. All that night he hung about the deserted dog corral, and
all through the night the snow fell steadily, so that by dawn he sank
into it to his shoulders when he moved out into the clearing.

But with day the sky had cleared. The sun came up, and the world was
almost too dazzling for the eyes. It warmed Baree's blood with new hope
and expectation. His brain struggled even more eagerly than yesterday
to comprehend. Surely the Willow would be returning soon! He would hear
her voice. She would appear suddenly out of the forest. He would
receive some signal from her. One of these things, or all of them, must
happen. He stopped sharply in his tracks at every sound, and sniffed
the air from every point of the wind. He was traveling ceaselessly. His
body made deep trails in the snow around and over the huge white mound
where the cabin had stood. His tracks led from the corral to the tall
spruce, and they were as numerous as the footprints of a wolf pack for
half a mile up and down the chasm.

On the afternoon of this day the second strong impulse came to him. It
was not reason, and neither was it instinct alone. It was the struggle
halfway between, the brute mind righting at its best with the mystery
of an intangible thing--something that could not be seen by the eye or
heard by the ear. Nepeese was not in the cabin, because there w