forbidding
strength, and in its tameless reserve, which yet held the capacity for
outbursts of ungovernable rage, this strange beast seemed to incarnate
the very spirit of the bitter and indomitable North. Its name was
various, for hunters called it sometimes wolverene, sometimes
carcajou, but oftener "Glutton," or "Injun Devil."

Through the voiceless desolation the carcajou--it was a female--continued
her leisurely way. Presently, just upon the edge of the forest-growth,
she came upon the fresh track of a huge lynx. The prints of the lynx's
great pads were several times broader than her own, but she stopped
and began to examine them without the slightest trace of apprehension. For
some reason best known to herself, she at length made up her mind to
pursue the stranger's back trail, concerning herself rather with what
he had been doing than with what he was about to do.

Plunging into the gloom of the firs, where the trail led over a
snow-covered chaos of boulders and tangled windfalls, she came
presently to a spot where the snow was disturbed and scratched. Her
eyes sparkled greedily. There were spatters of blood about the place,
and she realized that here the lynx had buried, for a future meal,
the remnant of his kill.

Her keen nose speedily told her just where the treasure was hidden,
and she fell to digging furiously with her short, powerful fore paws.
It was a bitter and lean season, and the lynx, after eating his fill,
had taken care to bury the remnant deep. The carcajou burrowed down
till only the tip of her dingy tail was visible before she found the
object of her search. It proved to be nothing but one hind quarter of
a little blue fox. Angrily she dragged it forth and bolted it in a
twinkling, crunching the slim bone between her powerful jaws. It was
but a morsel to such a hunger as hers. Licking her chops, and passing
her black paws hurriedly over her face, as a cat does, she forsook the
trail of the lynx and wandered on deeper into the soundless gloom.
Several rabbit-tracks she crossed, and here and there the dainty trail
of a ptarmigan, or the small, sequential dots of a weasel's foot. But
a single glance or passing twitch of her nostril told her these were
all old, and she vouchsafed them no attention. It was not till she had
gone perhaps a quarter of a mile through the fir-glooms that she came
upon a trail which caused her to halt.

It was the one trail, this, among all the tracks that traversed th