f.

"By Gar!" gasped the surprised Frenchman. "She do not fight wid de
wolf!"

As he travelled, he found no marks of battle in the snow, simply the
parallel trails of the two, dog and wolf, now trotting, now lengthening
out into the long, wolf lope.

"Fleur leave Jean Marcel for de wolf!" the trapper rubbed his eyes as
though suspicious of a trick of vision. His Fleur, whom he loved as his
life and who adored Jean Marcel, to desert him this way in the
night--and for a timber wolf.

It was strange indeed. Yet he had heard of such things. It was this way
that the Esquimos kept up the marvellous strain to which Fleur belonged.
He recalled the peculiar actions of the dog during the previous
days--the wolf tracks near the camp; her excitement of the night before
when the call had sounded over the valley. This wolf had been dogging
their trail for a week and Fleur had known it.

"Ah!" he murmured, nodding his head. "Eet ees de spreeng!"

Yes, the spring was slowly creeping north and the creatures of the
forest had already answered its call. It was April, and Fleur, too, had
succumbed to an urge stronger for the moment than the love of the
master. April, the Crees' "Moon of the Breaking of the Snow-Shoes,"
when, at last, the wind would begin to shift to the south and the nights
lose their edge, only to shift back again, with frost. Then the snow
would melt hard at noon, softening the trails, and later on, rain and
sleet would drive in from the great Bay turning the white floor of the
forest to slush, flooding the ice of the rivers which later would break
up and move out, overrunning the shell of pond and lake which late in
May would honeycomb and disappear.

Marcel followed the trails of wolf and dog until he lost them on the
wind-packed snow of the barren. There was nothing to do but wait. He
knew his dog had not forgotten him--would come home; but when? It was
high time for his return to the camp in the Salmon country, to his
precious cache of meat, which would attract lynxes and wolverines for
miles around. The bears would soon leave their "washes" and the uprights
of his cache were not proof against bear. But he would not go without
Fleur, and she was away, somewhere in the hills.

Three days he waited, continuing to hunt that he might take a full
sled-load back to his cache. But the weather was softening and any day
now might mean the start of the big "break-up." It was deep in the
third night that a great gray