n twos and
then in glowing constellations. There was an early moon. It was already
over the edge of the forests, flooding the world with a golden glow,
and in that glow the night was filled with grotesque black shadows that
had neither movement nor sound. Then the silence was broken. From out
of the owl-infested pits came a strange and hollow sound. Miki had
heard the shrill screeching and the TU-WHO-O-O, TU-WHO-O-O, TU-WHO-O-O
of the little owls, the trap-pirates, but never this voice of the
strong-winged Jezebels and Frankensteins of the deeper forests--the
real butchers of the night. It was a hollow, throaty sound--more a moan
than a cry; a moan so short and low that it seemed born of caution, or
of fear that it would frighten possible prey. For a few minutes pit
after pit gave forth each its signal of life, and then there was a
silence of voice, broken at intervals by the faint, crashing sweep of
great wings in the spruce and balsam tops as the hunters launched
themselves up and over them in the direction of the plain.

The going forth of the owls was only the beginning of the night
carnival for Neewa and Miki. For a long time they lay side by side,
sleepless, and listening. Past the windfall went the padded feet of a
fisher-cat, and they caught the scent of it; to them came the far cry
of a loon, the yapping of a restless fox, and the MOOING of a cow moose
feeding in the edge of a lake on the farther side of the plain. And
then, at last, came the thing that made their blood run faster and sent
a deeper thrill into their hearts.

It seemed a vast distance away at first--the hot throated cry of wolves
on the trail of meat. It was swinging northward into the plain, and
this shortly brought the cry with the wind, which was out of the north
and the west. The howling of the pack was very distinct after that, and
in Miki's brain nebulous visions and almost unintelligible memories
were swiftly wakening into life. It was not Challoner's voice that he
heard, but it was A VOICE THAT HE KNEW. It was the voice of Hela, his
giant father; the voice of Numa, his mother; the voice of his kind for
a hundred and a thousand generations before him, and it was the
instinct of those generations and the hazy memory of his earliest
puppyhood that were impinging the thing upon him. A little later it
would take both intelligence and experience to make him discriminate
the hair-breadth difference between wolf and dog. And this voice of his