ason or
method in his wandering. He was simply "traveling"--going on. He wanted
something which he could not find. The wolf call brought it to him.

The stars and the moon filled Baree with a yearning for this something.
The distant sounds impinged upon him his great aloneness. And instinct
told him that only by questing could he find. It was not so much Kazan
and Gray Wolf that he missed now--not so much motherhood and home as it
was companionship. Now that he had fought the wolfish rage out of him
in his battle with Oohoomisew, the dog part of him had come into its
own again--the lovable half of him, the part that wanted to snuggle up
near something that was alive and friendly, small odds whether it wore
feathers or fur, was clawed or hoofed.

He was sore from the Willow's bullet, and he was sore from battle, and
toward dawn he lay down under a shelter of some alders at the edge of a
second small lake and rested until midday. Then he began questing in
the reeds and close to the pond lilies for food. He found a dead
jackfish, partly eaten by a mink, and finished it.

His wound was much less painful this afternoon, and by nightfall he
scarcely noticed it at all. Since his almost tragic end at the hands of
Nepeese, he had been traveling in a general northeasterly direction,
following instinctively the run of the waterways. But his progress had
been slow, and when darkness came again he was not more than eight or
ten miles from the hole into which he had fallen after the Willow had
shot him.

Baree did not travel far this night. The fact that his wound had come
with dusk, and his fight with Oohoomisew still later, filled him with
caution. Experience had taught him that the dark shadows and the black
pits in the forest were possible ambuscades of danger. He was no longer
afraid, as he had once been, but he had had fighting enough for a time,
and so he accepted circumspection as the better part of valor and held
himself aloof from the perils of darkness. It was a strange instinct
that made him seek his bed on the top of a huge rock up which he had
some difficulty in climbing. Perhaps it was a harkening back to the
days of long ago when Gray Wolf, in her first motherhood, sought refuge
at the summit of the Sun Rock which towered high above the forest world
of which she and Kazan were a part, and where later she was blinded in
her battle with the lynx.

Baree's rock, instead of rising for a hundred feet or more straight