anged far and wide, and slept but little in
the lair that had now become cheerless and miserable. The she-wolf, too,
left her litter and went out in search of meat. In the first days after
the birth of the cubs, One Eye had journeyed several times back to the
Indian camp and robbed the rabbit snares; but, with the melting of the
snow and the opening of the streams, the Indian camp had moved away, and
that source of supply was closed to him.

When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the far
white wall, he found that the population of his world had been reduced.
Only one sister remained to him. The rest were gone. As he grew
stronger, he found himself compelled to play alone, for the sister no
longer lifted her head nor moved about. His little body rounded out with
the meat he now ate; but the food had come too late for her. She slept
continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round with skin in which the flame
flickered lower and lower and at last went out.

Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father
appearing and disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the
entrance. This had happened at the end of a second and less severe
famine. The she-wolf knew why One Eye never came back, but there was no
way by which she could tell what she had seen to the grey cub. Hunting
herself for meat, up the left fork of the stream where lived the lynx,
she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye. And she had found him, or
what remained of him, at the end of the trail. There were many signs of
the battle that had been fought, and of the lynx's withdrawal to her lair
after having won the victory. Before she went away, the she-wolf had
found this lair, but the signs told her that the lynx was inside, and she
had not dared to venture in.

After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork. For she
knew that in the lynx's lair was a litter of kittens, and she knew the
lynx for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible fighter. It was
all very well for half a dozen wolves to drive a lynx, spitting and
bristling, up a tree; but it was quite a different matter for a lone wolf
to encounter a lynx--especially when the lynx was known to have a litter
of hungry kittens at her back.

But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times
fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was to
come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub's sake, w