cupine," he whispered. "Almost crawled over you. He
sure would have stuck you full of quills."

Whereupon he threw a stick at the animal. It bounced straight up to turn
round with startling quickness, and it gave forth a rattling sound; then
it crawled out of sight.

"Por--cu--pine!" whispered Bo, pantingly. "It might--as well--have
been--an elephant!"

Helen uttered a long, eloquent sigh. She would not have cared to
describe her emotions at sight of a harmless hedgehog.

"Listen!" warned Dale, very low. His big hand closed over Helen's
gauntleted one. "There you have--the real cry of the wild."

Sharp and cold on the night air split the cry of a wolf, distant, yet
wonderfully distinct. How wild and mournful and hungry! How marvelously
pure! Helen shuddered through all her frame with the thrill of its
music, the wild and unutterable and deep emotions it aroused. Again
a sound of this forest had pierced beyond her life, back into the dim
remote past from which she had come.

The cry was not repeated. The coyotes were still. And silence fell,
absolutely unbroken.

Dale nudged Helen, and then reached over to give Bo a tap. He was
peering keenly ahead and his strained intensity could be felt. Helen
looked with all her might and she saw the shadowy gray forms of the
coyotes skulk away, out of the moonlight into the gloom of the woods,
where they disappeared. Not only Dale's intensity, but the very silence,
the wildness of the moment and place, seemed fraught with wonderful
potency. Bo must have felt it, too, for she was trembling all over, and
holding tightly to Helen, and breathing quick and fast.

"A-huh!" muttered Dale, under his breath.

Helen caught the relief and certainty in his exclamation, and she
divined, then, something of what the moment must have been to a hunter.

Then her roving, alert glance was arrested by a looming gray shadow
coming out of the forest. It moved, but surely that huge thing could not
be a bear. It passed out of gloom into silver moonlight. Helen's heart
bounded. For it was a great frosty-coated bear lumbering along toward
the dead horse. Instinctively Helen's hand sought the arm of the hunter.
It felt like iron under a rippling surface. The touch eased away the
oppression over her lungs, the tightness of her throat. What must have
been fear left her, and only a powerful excitement remained. A sharp
expulsion of breath from Bo and a violent jerk of her frame were signs
that she had