dug
this out of the snow and ate the frozen flesh.

All that day it grew colder--steadily colder. The night that followed
was cloudless, with a white moon and brilliant stars. The temperature
had fallen another ten degrees, and nothing was moving. Traps were never
sprung on such nights, for even the furred things--the mink, and the
ermine, and the lynx--lay snug in the holes and the nests they had found
for themselves. An increasing hunger was not strong enough to drive
Kazan and Gray Wolf from their windfall. The next day there was no break
in the terrible cold, and toward noon Kazan set out on a hunt for meat,
leaving Gray Wolf in the windfall. Being three-quarters dog, food was
more necessary to Kazan than to his mate. Nature has fitted the
wolf-breed for famine, and in ordinary temperature Gray Wolf could have
lived for a fortnight without food. At sixty degrees below zero she
could exist a week, perhaps ten days. Only thirty hours had passed
sinee they had devoured the last of the frozen rabbit, and she was quite
satisfied to remain in their snug retreat.

But Kazan was hungry. He began to hunt in the face of the wind,
traveling toward the burned plain. He nosed about every windfall that he
came to, and investigated the thickets. A thin shot-like snow had
fallen, and in this--from the windfall to the burn--he found but a
single trail, and that was the trail of an ermine. Under a windfall he
caught the warm scent of a rabbit, but the rabbit was as safe from him
there as were the partridges in the trees, and after an hour of futile
digging and gnawing he gave up his effort to reach it. For three hours
he had hunted when he returned to Gray Wolf. He was exhausted. While
Gray Wolf, with the instinct of the wild, had saved her own strength and
energy, Kazan had been burning up his reserve forces, and was hungrier
than ever.

The moon rose clear and brilliant in the sky again that night, and Kazan
set out once more on the hunt. He urged Gray Wolf to accompany him,
whining for her outside the windfall--returning for her twice--but
Gray Wolf laid her ears aslant and refused to move. The temperature had
now fallen to sixty-five or seventy degrees below zero, and with it
there came from the north an increasing wind, making the night one in
which human life could not have existed for an hour. By midnight Kazan
was back under the windfall. The wind grew stronger. It began to wail in
mournful dirges over the swamp, and then