uickly. He pants like a wild beast. There is reason for
it. His thoughts are with the wolf. He is the wolf. The personalities of
the ravening brute and of the man are blended now in one, or rather the
personality of the man has been eliminated. The man's body is in the
lumbermen's camp, but his mind is in the depths of the forest. He is
seeking prey!

* * * * *

"I am hungry! I must have warm blood and flesh! The darkness is here,
and my time has come. There are no deer to-night in the pine forest on
the hill, where I have run them down and torn them. The deep snow has
driven them into the lower forest, where men have been at work. The
deer will be feeding to-night on the buds of the trees the men have
felled. How I hate men and fear them! They are different from the other
animals in the wood. I shun them. They are stronger than I in some way.
There is death about them. As I crept by the farm beside the river this
morning I saw a young one, a child with yellow hair. Ah, how I would
like to feed upon her! Her throat was white and soft. But I dare not
rush through the field and seize her. The man was there, and he would
have killed me. They are not hungry. The odor of flesh came to me in the
wind across the clearing. It was the same way at this time when the snow
was deep last year. It is some day on which they feast. But I will feed
better. I will have hot blood. The deer are in the tops of the fallen
trees now!"

Across frozen streams, gliding like a shadow through the underbrush,
swift, silent, with only its gleaming eyes to betray it, the gaunt
figure goes. Miles are past. The figure threads its way between the
trunks of massive trees. It passes over fallen logs with long, noiseless
leaps; it creeps serpent-like beneath the wreck left by a summer
"cyclone"; it crosses the barren reaches of oak openings, where the
shadows cast by huge pines adjacent mingle in fantastic figures; it
casts a shifting shadow itself as it sweeps across some lighter spot,
where faint moonbeams find their way to the ground through overhanging
branches. The figure approaches the spot where the lumbermen have been
at work. Among the tops of the fallen trees are other figures--light,
graceful, flitting about. The deer are feeding on the buds.

The eyes of the long gray figure stealing on grow more flaming still.
The yellow fangs are disclosed cruelly. Slowly it creeps forward. It is
close upon the flitting figu