ran through the night. And the next
day found them still running. They were running over the surface of a
world frozen and dead. No life stirred. They alone moved through the
vast inertness. They alone were alive, and they sought for other things
that were alive in order that they might devour them and continue to
live.

They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a
lower-lying country before their quest was rewarded. Then they came upon
moose. It was a big bull they first found. Here was meat and life, and
it was guarded by no mysterious fires nor flying missiles of flame. Splay
hoofs and palmated antlers they knew, and they flung their customary
patience and caution to the wind. It was a brief fight and fierce. The
big bull was beset on every side. He ripped them open or split their
skulls with shrewdly driven blows of his great hoofs. He crushed them
and broke them on his large horns. He stamped them into the snow under
him in the wallowing struggle. But he was foredoomed, and he went down
with the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and with other teeth
fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before ever his last
struggles ceased or his last damage had been wrought.

There was food in plenty. The bull weighed over eight hundred
pounds--fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd wolves of
the pack. But if they could fast prodigiously, they could feed
prodigiously, and soon a few scattered bones were all that remained of
the splendid live brute that had faced the pack a few hours before.

There was now much resting and sleeping. With full stomachs, bickering
and quarrelling began among the younger males, and this continued through
the few days that followed before the breaking-up of the pack. The
famine was over. The wolves were now in the country of game, and though
they still hunted in pack, they hunted more cautiously, cutting out heavy
cows or crippled old bulls from the small moose-herds they ran across.

There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split in
half and went in different directions. The she-wolf, the young leader on
her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half of the pack
down to the Mackenzie River and across into the lake country to the east.
Each day this remnant of the pack dwindled. Two by two, male and female,
the wolves were deserting. Occasionally a solitary male was driven out
by the sharp