misgave her, because of the strange trail, and the
knowledge that a new presence had come into the woods. She had no fear
of the forest, so long as it lay far from the trail, and the thing she
distrusted. For all that, the great secrecy that was upon her made her
shun the open places where the moonlight glared, and keep rather to the
good grey glooms where her body melted among the shadows, and seemed
itself a shade. And the little furry fatness hanging helpless from her
jaws gave itself up limply to its mother's will, and to the vast
movement of the night.

The new den she had chosen as a refuge for her cubs lay among the
innermost recesses of Carboona, below the granite peaks. No brakes here,
no watching junipers: a waste of rock and scrub, scored by deep ravines
and dried beds of water-courses that thundered in the thaw.

But black and inhospitable though the region was, it possessed the one
thing dear to uneasy motherhood--absolute loneliness. She had dug the
den herself, enlarging a natural hollow beside an enormous rock. Not
even the father wolf himself knew as yet where the new den was; for by
the unwritten law of wolf-life he was banished from the home during the
infancy of the cubs.

Here the old wolf deposited her baby, leaving it in shivering loneliness
to grow used to the new home as best it might till its brothers and
sisters were brought to join it. Five times more the mother made the
long double journey, each time carrying a cub. As she returned to the
old den on the sixth and last time, the sun was already high above the
eastern hills.

The last cub was not in a happy frame of mind. One by one, its brothers
and sisters had been taken away from it, which meant that, as each hairy
little bundle of warmth went out under the moon, the warmth in the den
was that much the less. And when the fifth had followed the way of the
others, the remaining cub felt solitary indeed.

At first he lay perfectly still, for that was his mother's command,
though she had not put it into words. The deep mother-wisdom that warms
the wits of the wild creatures has its own mysterious ways of conveying
its meaning. "Lie still!" is one of the very first lessons a mother
teaches her young. "Run home!" follows close upon it. To disobey either
may mean death.

It grew colder in the den and lonelier. The last cub didn't want to
disobey and he really did try to go to sleep; but cold and loneliness
are uneasy bed-fellows, and he ha