they were all wide-awake, and bent her body at the shoulders
till her deep chest touched the earth. Next a hind leg stretched out
straight and tense as a bar, and was taken back again in nervous little
jerks. At the same time she yawned mightily, wrinkling her nose and
showing her red gums with the black fringes and the long white fangs
that could reach a deer's heart in a single snap. Then she leaped upon a
great rock and sat up straight, with her bushy tail curled close about
her fore paws, a savage, powerful, noble-looking beast, peering down
gravely over the green mountains to the shining sea.

A moment before the hillside had appeared utterly lifeless, so still and
rugged and desolate that one must notice and welcome the stir of a mouse
or ground squirrel in the moss, speaking of life that is glad and free
and vigorous even in the deepest solitudes; yet now, so quietly did the
old wolf appear, so perfectly did her rough gray coat blend with the
rough gray rocks, that the hillside seemed just as tenantless as before.
A stray wind seemed to move the mosses, that was all. Only where the
mountains once slept now they seemed wide-awake. Keen eyes saw every
moving thing, from the bees in the bluebells to the slow fishing-boats
far out at sea; sharp ears that were cocked like a collie's heard every
chirp and trill and rustle, and a nose that understood everything was
holding up every vagrant breeze and searching it for its message. For
the cubs were coming out for the first time to play in the big world,
and no wild mother ever lets that happen without first taking infinite
precautions that her little ones be not molested nor made afraid.

A faint breeze from the west strayed over the mountains and instantly
the old wolf turned her sensitive nose to question it. There on her
right, and just across a deep ravine where a torrent went leaping down
to the sea in hundred-foot jumps, a great stag caribou was standing,
still as a stone, on a lofty pinnacle, looking down over the marvelous
panorama spread wide beneath his feet. Every day Megaleep came there to
look, and the old wolf in her daily hunts often crossed the deep path
which he had worn through the moss from the wide table-lands over the
ridge to this sightly place where he could look down curiously at the
comings and goings of men on the sea. But at this season when small game
was abundant--and indeed at all seasons when not hunger-driven--the wolf
was peaceable and t