mong a maze of bramble-brakes and ancient
thickets of thorn and juniper covering the foot of one of Carboona's
eastern spurs, one morning very early, as Little-Sweet-Voice, the
white-throated sparrow, was singing his earliest song, a great event
took place.

It was twilight in the badger-hole, and only persons accustomed to odds
and ends of day-light could have seen what was going on. Not that it
mattered. The only person to whom it could have mattered was a grey
mother-wolf, and she did not need the light.

The badger-hole had been enlarged, and specially arranged for the event,
without the badgers having been consulted. This wasn't as rude as it
sounds, for the simple reason that there hadn't been any badgers to
consult. Long before the mother-wolf and her mate had gone
apartment-hunting, the badgers had moved deeper into Carboona, leaving
no address. Now that it was more roomy and better aired, it was a
pleasant place enough so long as you didn't stub your nose against a
jagged stump of pine root that pierced the northern wall. True it was a
little damp in places, and got noticeably stuffier as you went further
in; but it was a good wolf stuffiness, and helped to give the true home
smell that warned strangers that all interfering noses had best keep out
of the way.

Before Little-Sweet-Voice, at the tip of his fir-branch high over the
hole, had come to the end of his song, seven baby wolves had got
themselves born.

* * * * *

Seven little blind, hairless, helpless things that hadn't an inch of
beauty between them; seven little flabby uglinesses that could do
nothing but wriggle and suck. But such as they were, the old wolf loved
her ugly babies with all her wolfish heart. For a long time no one--not
even the father wolf--saw them but herself. A better place for being
secret than the hole among the bramble-brakes she could not have chosen.
The great old thorn-trees, with their twisty stems and thorny branches
which had been growing twistier and thornier through countless moons,
stretched their gnarled limbs high above the den and guarded endless
secrecies as countless as the moons. And the brambles reached their
twisted tangles this way and that in a bewildering labyrinth of thorns.
While, dotting all the upper slopes, the junipers, large and little,
stood up in dusk battalions above the lonely land. None but the wild
furred feet of the wilderness ever went that way. In all its ma