id, like a wraith of the winter, down a silent
forest aisle.

Then came the White Wolf of the Frozen Wastes, the terror of the
blizzard, ghost-like, enormous, and swift. In dead, grim silence came
he, loping his loose, tireless wolf's lope, and stopped at a windfall,
where two forest giants, their decaying strength discovered by the
extra weight of snow, lay prone, one across the other.

For a moment he paused, nose up, testing the still, cold air; then he
leapt upon the upper fallen tree. He had, seen up there and clearly,
an enormously thick and woolly coat, that magnified his already record
size. You see him trotting along the tree-trunk. Then he stopped and
stared down into the dark hollow under the upper tree. Then he
sniffed--audibly. Then he licked his nose--and very red was his
tongue. Then--but this he couldn't help, I verily believe, as he
balanced there with his pricked ears and bright eyes--he whined.

And instantly his little, impatient, dog-like whine was answered by a
deep, deep growl, that seemed to come out of the bowels of the earth.

He was just in time, as he leapt lightly off the windfall, to avoid the
rush of a vast brown bulk, reeking of carrion, furry, terrible, with
live-coals for eyes, and threshing the air with claws Heaven knows how
long, which hurled itself like an avalanche out of the hollow at him.
And that thing was a bear.

Now, bears do not, as a rule, without extraordinary reason, in that
land, rouse themselves out of their winter sleep for the mere whine of
a wolf. They are impregnable where they are, and know it. The
extraordinary reason, however, was present. The white wolf was
sniffing at it now--the bear's blood-trail to the windfall. Bruin had
been roused once before that day--by beaters. He had then been driven
forward, shot at by hunters, wounded, escaped, and returned to his den.
But--but, I give you my word, if those beaters, those peasants, had
known the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was out, nothing in the wide
world would have induced them to beat for bears or anything else in
that vicinity.

The white wolf stretched himself to a canter, and slid away through the
forest, dropping the trees past him like telegraph-poles past a
railway-carriage window. He looked like the very spirit of winter, the
demon of the snows, and stood for that in the ignorant minds of the
sparsely scattered people--perhaps because at a short distance he was
nearly invisible. Hi