started to follow; but the pack had turned back, and he at length after
them, snarling at their heels. Now he knew how long the swim looked
from the deer's point of view.

It was an ugly proposition. But--he turned his head in the stillness,
broken only by the multitudinous voices of the ice, and heard a far,
far distant multitudinous murmur, and that was no ice, and it settled
him. It was the united voice of the pack _on his trail_!

He paused, ran up and down, gave an odd, little, deeply expressive
whine, like a puppy afraid to take its first bath, plunged in with a
rush, and struck out. Soon he was out upon a piece of drift ice,
shaking himself, and began leaping from one lump of floating ice to
another. It was tricky, slippery, slidy work, and a fall might mean a
broken leg or a crushed skull; but anything was better than dissolving
like mincemeat in the jaws of the slavering pack.

Once, when a long way out, he looked back, and beheld the she-wolf,
whining piteously as if she were being thrashed--and wolves are dumb
beasts when "up against it"--following him.

She, too, had heard that wild, terrifying, implacable music of the
wolf-pack following them; and although I, personally, doubt if they
would have touched her--unless it was the other she-wolves that did
it--she seemed to have been smitten by panic, and to prefer the deep
sea, or the river, rather, to that pack of maddened devils.

And so, slipping, sliding, splashing, swimming, scrambling, the white
wolf, after the most appalling struggle of his life, managed somehow,
blindly in the end, with sobbing breath and pounding sides, to make
that terrible passage, and collapse as he landed in a stiff white heap,
the water frozen in icicles upon his body as he landed.

For a long time he did not move, and it began to seem as if he had
burst his heart. But at last he dragged himself to his feet and turned
drunkenly--to find the she-wolf lying at his side.

Thoughts came back slowly; but at length he shook himself, and stood
erect at his full, immense height. He had given the wolf-pack
something tricky in the way of trails to unravel, but he knew what he
had taught them too well to build too much on that. And he was right,
for presently, from far, far across the water, came the unutterably
terrible baying clamor of the pack, moving swiftly along--then it
stopped.

For a long while he waited after that, straining ears and eyes out over
the moving ice,