e an unspotted sheet. He made his way hesitatingly across the
clearing to the door. There were no tracks. Drifted snow was piled high
over the sill. He whined, and scratched at the door. There was no
answer. And he heard no sound.

He went back into the edge of the timber, and waited. He waited all
through that day, going occasionally to the cabin, and smelling about
it, to convince himself that he had not made a mistake. When darkness
came he hollowed himself out a bed in the fresh snow close to the door
and lay there all through the night. Day came again, gray and empty and
still there was no smoke from the chimney or sound from within the log
walls, and at last he knew that Challoner and Nanette and the baby were
gone. But he was hopeful. He no longer listened for sound from within
the cabin, but watched and listened for them to come from out of the
forest. He made short quests, hunting now on this side and now on that
of the cabin, sniffing futilely at the fresh and trackless snow and
pointing the wind for minutes at a time. In the afternoon, with a
forlorn slouch to his body, he went deeper into the forest to hunt for
a rabbit. When he had killed and eaten his supper he returned again and
slept a second night in the burrow beside the door. A third day and a
third night he remained, and the third night he heard the wolves
howling under a clear and star-filled sky, and from him there came his
first cry--a yearning, grief-filled cry that rose wailingly out of the
clearing; the entreaty for his master, for Nanette, and the baby. It
was not an answer to the wolves. In its note there was a trembling
fear, the voicing of a thing that had grown into hopelessness.

And now there settled upon him a loneliness greater than any loneliness
he had ever known. Something seemed to whisper to his canine brain that
all he had seen and felt had been but a dream, and that he was face to
face with his old world again, its dangers, its vast and soul-breaking
emptiness, its friendlessness, its ceaseless strife for existence. His
instincts, dulled by the worship of what the cabin had held, became
keenly alive. He sensed again the sharp thrill of danger, which comes
of ALONENESS, and his old caution fell upon him, so that the fourth day
he slunk around the edge of the clearing like a wolf.

The fifth night he did not sleep in the clearing but found himself a
windfall a mile back in the forest. That night he had strange and
troubled dream