bring up the
snow-shoe rabbit. Gray Wolf muzzled the fur and flesh, but would not
eat. Still a little later Kazan urged her to follow him to the trail. He
no longer wanted to stay at the top of the Sun Rock, and he no longer
wanted Gray Wolf to stay there. Step by step he drew her down the
winding path away from her dead puppies. She would move only when he was
very near her--so near that she could touch his scarred flank with her
nose.

They came at last to the point in the trail where they had to leap down
a distance of three or four feet from the edge of a rock, and here Kazan
saw how utterly helpless Gray Wolf had become. She whined, and crouched
twenty times before she dared make the spring, and then she jumped
stiff-legged, and fell in a heap at Kazan's feet. After this Kazan did
not have to urge her so hard, for the fall impinged on her the fact that
she was safe only when her muzzle touched her mate's flank. She followed
him obediently when they reached the plain, trotting with her
foreshoulder to his hip.

Kazan was heading for a thicket in the creek bottom half a mile away,
and a dozen times in that short distance Gray Wolf stumbled and fell.
And each time that she fell Kazan learned a little more of the
limitations of blindness. Once he sprang off in pursuit of a rabbit, but
he had not taken twenty leaps when he stopped and looked back. Gray Wolf
had not moved an inch. She stood motionless, sniffing the air--waiting
for him! For a full minute Kazan stood, also waiting. Then he returned
to her. Ever after this he returned to the point where he had left Gray
Wolf, knowing that he would find her there.

All that day they remained in the thicket. In the afternoon he visited
the cabin. Joan and her husband were there, and both saw at once
Kazan's torn side and his lacerated head and shoulders.

"Pretty near a finish fight for him," said the man, after he had
examined him. "It was either a lynx or a bear. Another wolf could not do
that."

For half an hour Joan worked over him, talking to him all the time, and
fondling him with her soft hands. She bathed his wounds in warm water,
and then covered them with a healing salve, and Kazan was filled again
with that old restful desire to remain with her always, and never to go
back into the forests. For an hour she let him lie on the edge of her
dress, with his nose touching her foot, while she worked on baby things.
Then she rose to prepare supper, and Kazan got up-