eveloped to its finest
point that sixth sense of the animal kingdom, the sense of orientation,
and as straight as a pigeon might have winged its flight she cut through
the bush to the spot where they had cached the rabbit. A white fox had
been there ahead of her, and she found only scattered bits of hair and
fur. What the fox had left the moose-birds and bush-jays had carried
away. Hungrily Gray Wolf turned back to the river.

That night she slept again where Kazan had lain, and three times she
called for him without answer. A heavy dew fell, and it drenched the
last vestige of her mate's scent out of the sand. But still through the
day that followed, and the day that followed that, blind Gray Wolf clung
to the narrow rim of white sand. On the fourth day her hunger reached a
point where she gnawed the bark from willow bushes. It was on this day
that she made a discovery. She was drinking, when her sensitive nose
touched something in the water's edge that was smooth, and bore a faint
odor of flesh. It was one of the big northern river clams. She pawed it
ashore, sniffing at the hard shell. Then she crunched it between her
teeth. She had never tasted sweeter meat than that which she found
inside, and she began hunting for other clams. She found many of them,
and ate until she was no longer hungry. For three days more she remained
on the bar.

And then, one night, the call came to her. It set her quivering with a
strange new excitement--something that may have been a new hope, and in
the moonlight she trotted nervously up and down the shining strip of
sand, facing now the north, and now the south, and then the east and the
west--her head flung up, listening, as if in the soft wind of the night
she was trying to locate the whispering lure of a wonderful voice. And
whatever it was that came to her came from out of the south and east.
Off there--across the barren, far beyond the outer edge of the northern
timber-line--was _home_. And off there, in her brute way, she reasoned
that she must find Kazan. The call did not come from their old windfall
home in the swamp. It came from beyond that, and in a flashing vision
there rose through her blindness a picture of the towering Sun Rock, of
the winding trail that led to it, and the cabin on the plain. It was
there that blindness had come to her. It was there that day had ended,
and eternal night had begun. And it was there that she had mothered her
first-born. Nature had registere