man who has heard the pack song to the
moon could doubt this fact. It is a long, melancholy wail, poignant with
the pain of living, but it tells what man can not.

Ben knew, now, why he was a forester, a woodsman famed even among
woodsmen. Most of his fellows had been tamed by civilization; they had
lived beneath roofs instead of the canopy of heaven, and they had almost
forgotten about the moon. Ben, on the other hand, was a recurrence of an
earlier type, inheriting little from his immediate ancestors but
reverting back a thousand centuries to the Cave and the Squatting Place.
His nature was that of prehistoric man rather than that of the son of
civilization; and in this lay the explanation for all that had set him
apart from the great run of men and had made him the master woodsman
that he was. And because his spirit was of the wildwood, because he also
knew the magic of the moon, he was able to make this wildwood thing at
his feet understand and obey his will.

The world of to-day seemed to fade out for him and left only the wolf,
its fierce eyes on his own. Time swung back, and this might have been a
scene of forgotten ages,--the wolf, the human hunter, the smoldering
camp fire, the dark, jagged line of spruce against the sky. It was thus
at the edge of the ice. Wolf and man--both children of the wild--had
understood each other then; and they could understand each other now.

"Fenris, old boy," the man whispered. "Can you find him for me, Fenris?
He's out there somewhere--" the man motioned toward the dark--"and I
want him. Can you take me to him?"

The wolf trembled all over, struggling to get his meaning. This was no
creature of subordinate intelligence: the great wolf of the North. He
had, besides the cunning of the wild hunters, the intelligence that is
the trait of the whole canine breed. Nor did he depend on his sense of
hearing alone. He watched his master's face, and more than that, he was
tuned and keyed to those mysterious vibrations that carry a message from
brain to brain no less clearly and swift than words themselves,--the
secret wireless of the wild.

"He's my buddy, old boy, and I want you to find him for me," Ben went
on, more patiently. He searched his pockets, drawing out at last the
copy of the letter Ezram had given him that morning, and, because the
old man had carried it for many days, it could still convey a message to
the keen nose of the wolf. He put it to the animal's nostrils, then
p