A wolf is a heavy sleeper after a feast. A hunter would have said that
this wolf had gorged itself the night before. Still, something had
alarmed it. Faintly there came to this wilderness outlaw that most
thrilling of all things to the denizens of the forest--the scent of
man. He came down the ridge with the slow indifference of a full-fed
animal, and with only a half of his old cunning; trotted across the
softening snow of an opening and stopped where the man-scent was so
strong that he lifted his head straight up to the sky and sent out to
his comrades in forest and plain the warning signal that he had struck
a human trail. A wolf will do this, and no more, in broad day. At
night he might follow, and others would join him in the chase; but
with daylight about him he gives the warning and after a little slinks
away from the trail.

But something held this wolf. There was a mystery in the air which
puzzled him. Straight ahead there ran the broad, smooth trail of a
sled and the footprints of many dogs. Sometime within the last hour
the "dog mail" from Wabinosh House had passed that way on its long
trip to civilization. But it was not the swift passage of man and
dog that held the wolf rigidly alert, ready for flight--and yet
hesitating. It was something from the opposite direction, from the
North, out of which the wind was coming. First it was sound; then it
was scent--then both, and the wolf sped in swift flight up the sunlit
ridge.

In the direction from which the alarm came there stretched a small
lake, and on its farther edge, a quarter of a mile away, there
suddenly darted out from the dense rim of balsam forest a jumble of
dogs and sledge and man. For a few moments the mass of animals seemed
entangled in some kind of wreck or engaged in one of those fierce
battles in which the half-wild sledge-dogs of the North frequently
engage, even on the trail. Then there came the sharp, commanding cries
of a human voice, the cracking of a whip, the yelping of the
huskies, and the disordered team straightened itself and came like a
yellowish-gray streak across the smooth surface of the lake. Close
beside the sledge ran the man. He was tall, and thin, and even at that
distance one would have recognized him as an Indian. Hardly had the
team and its wild-looking driver progressed a quarter of the distance
across the lake when there came a shout farther back, and a second
sledge burst into view from out of the thick forest. Be