m. He was big, and powerful, and restless. Less than two
years old, he weighed a good eighty pounds. His pads were broad and
wolfish. His chest and shoulders were like a Malemute's, heavy and yet
muscled for speed. He was wider between the eyes than the wolf-breed
husky, and his eyes were larger, and entirely clear of the Wuttooi, or
blood film, that marks the wolf and also to an extent the husky. His
jaws were like Kazan's, perhaps even more powerful.

Through all that week of the Big Storm he traveled without food. There
were four days of snow, with driving blizzards and fierce winds, and
after that three days of intense cold in which every living creature
kept to its warm dugout in the snow. Even the birds had burrowed
themselves in. One might have walked on the backs of caribou and moose
and not have guessed it. Baree sheltered himself during the worst of
the storm but did not allow the snow to gather over him.

Every trapper from Hudson's Bay to the country of the Athabasca knew
that after the Big Storm the famished fur animals would be seeking
food, and that traps and deadfalls properly set and baited stood the
biggest chance of the year of being filled. Some of them set out over
their trap lines on the sixth day; some on the seventh, and others on
the eighth. It was on the seventh day that Bush McTaggart started over
Pierre Eustach's line, which was now his own for the season. It took
him two days to uncover the traps, dig the snow from them, rebuild the
fallen "trap houses," and rearrange the baits. On the third day he was
back at Lac Bain.

It was on this day that Baree came to the cabin at the far end of
McTaggart's line. McTaggart's trail was fresh in the snow about the
cabin, and the instant Baree sniffed of it every drop of blood in his
body seemed to leap suddenly with a strange excitement. It took perhaps
half a minute for the scent that filled his nostrils to associate
itself with what had gone before, and at the end of that half-minute
there rumbled in Baree's chest a deep and sullen growl. For many
minutes after that he stood like a black rock in the snow, watching the
cabin.

Then slowly he began circling about it, drawing nearer and nearer,
until at last he was sniffing at the threshold. No sound or smell of
life came from inside, but he could smell the old smell of McTaggart.
Then he faced the wilderness--the direction in which the trap line ran
back to Lac Bain. He was trembling. His muscles tw