. He had traveled
all day, but he was not tired. There was something about night, now that
there were no men near, that exhilarated him strangely. The wolf blood
in him ran swifter and swifter. To-night it was clear. The sky was
filled with stars. The moon rose. And at last he settled back in the
snow and turned his head straight up to the spruce-tops, and the wolf
came out of him in a long mournful cry which quivered through the still
night for miles.

For a long time he sat and listened after that howl. He had found
voice--a voice with a strange new note in it, and it gave him still
greater confidence. He had expected an answer, but none came. He had
traveled in the face of the wind, and as he howled, a bull moose crashed
through the scrub timber ahead of him, his horns rattling against the
trees like the tattoo of a clear birch club as he put distance between
himself and that cry.

Twice Kazan howled before he went on, and he found joy in the practise
of that new note. He came then to the foot of a rough ridge, and turned
up out of the swamp to the top of it. The stars and the moon were nearer
to him there, and on the other side of the ridge he looked down upon a
great sweeping plain, with a frozen lake glistening in the moonlight,
and a white river leading from it off into timber that was neither so
thick nor so black as that in the swamp.

And then every muscle in his body grew tense, and his blood leaped. From
far off in the plain there came a cry. It was _his_ cry--the wolf-cry.
His jaws snapped. His white fangs gleamed, and he growled deep in his
throat. He wanted to reply, but some strange instinct urged him not to.
That instinct of the wild was already becoming master of him. In the
air, in the whispering of the spruce-tops, in the moon and the stars
themselves, there breathed a spirit which told him that what he had
heard was the wolf-cry, but that it was not the wolf _call_.

The other came an hour later, clear and distinct, that same wailing howl
at the beginning--but ending in a staccato of quick sharp yelps that
stirred his blood at once into a fiery excitement that it had never
known before. The same instinct told him that this was the call--the
hunt-cry. It urged him to come quickly. A few moments later it came
again, and this time there was a reply from close down along the foot of
the ridge, and another from so far away that Kazan could scarcely hear
it. The hunt-pack was gathering for the night c