,
strange laugh when they were still a quarter of a mile away from him.
Bram merely set loose his wolves. By a miracle Corporal Lee lived to
drag himself to a half-breed's cabin, where he died a little later, and
the half-breed brought the story to Fort Churchill.

After this, Bram disappeared from the eyes of the world. What he lived
in those four or five years that followed would well be worth his
pardon if his experiences could be made to appear between the covers of
a book. Bram--AND HIS WOLVES! Think of it. Alone. In all that time
without a voice to talk to him. Not once appearing at a post for food.
A loup-garou. An animal-man. A companion of wolves. By the end of the
third year there was not a drop of dog-blood in his pack. It was wolf,
all wolf. From whelps he brought the wolves up, until he had twenty in
his pack. They were monsters, for the under-grown ones he killed.
Perhaps he would have given them freedom in place of death, but these
wolf-beasts of Bram's would not accept freedom. In him they recognized
instinctively the super-beast, and they were his slaves. And Bram,
monstrous and half animal himself, loved them. To him they were
brother, sister, wife--all creation. He slept with them, and ate with
them, and starved with them when food was scarce. They were comradeship
and protection. When Bram wanted meat, and there was meat in the
country, he would set his wolf-horde on the trail of a caribou or a
moose, and if they drove half a dozen miles ahead of Bram himself there
would always be plenty of meat left on the bones when he arrived. Four
years of that! The Police would not believe it. They laughed at the
occasional rumors that drifted in from the far places; rumors that Bram
had been seen, and that his great voice had been heard rising above the
howl of his pack on still winter nights, and that half-breeds and
Indians had come upon his trails, here and there--at widely divergent
places. It was the French half-breed superstition of the chasse-galere
that chiefly made them disbelieve, and the chasse-galere is a thing not
to be laughed at in the northland. It is composed of creatures who have
sold their souls to the devil for the power of navigating the air, and
there were those who swore with their hands on the crucifix of the
Virgin that they had with their own eyes seen Bram and his wolves
pursuing the shadowy forms of great beasts through the skies.

So the Police believed that Bram was dead; and Bram