the wild cotton
balls from the burn-bush! I have tried strychnine in deer fat, an' I
have set traps and deadfalls, but I can not catch them. They will drive
me out unless I get them, for I have taken only five good lynx, an' they
have destroyed seven."

This roused Weyman. He was one of that growing number of thoughtful men
who believe that man's egoism, as a race, blinds him to many of the more
wonderful facts of creation. He had thrown down the gantlet, and with a
logic that had gained him a nation-wide hearing, to those who believed
that man was the only living creature who could reason, and that common
sense and cleverness when displayed by any other breathing thing were
merely instinct. The facts behind Henri's tale of woe struck him as
important, and until midnight they talked about the two strange wolves.

"There is one big wolf an' one smaller," said Henri. "An' it is always
the big wolf who goes in an' fights the lynx. I see that by the snow.
While he's fighting, the smaller wolf makes many tracks in the snow just
out of reach, an' then when the lynx is down, or dead, it jumps in an'
helps tear it into pieces. All that I know by the snow. Only once have I
seen where the smaller one went in an' fought with the other, an' then
there was blood all about that was not lynx blood; I trailed the devils
a mile by the dripping."

During the two weeks that followed, Weyman found much to add to the
material of his book. Not a day passed that somewhere along Henri's
trap-line they did not see the trails of the two wolves, and Weyman
observed that--as Henri had told him--the footprints were always two by
two, and never one by one. On the third day they came to a trap that had
held a lynx, and at sight of what remained Henri cursed in both French
and English until he was purple in the face. The lynx had been torn
until its pelt was practically worthless.

Weyman saw where the smaller wolf had waited on its haunches, while its
companion had killed the lynx. He did not tell Henri all he thought. But
the days that followed convinced him more and more that he had found the
most dramatic exemplification of his theory. Back of this mysterious
tragedy of the trap-line there was a _reason_.

Why did the two wolves not destroy the fisher-cat, the ermine and the
marten? Why was their feud with the lynx alone?

Weyman was strangely thrilled. He was a lover of wild things, and for
that reason he never carried a gun. And when he s