tness there were thousands of hollows
where all manner of four-footed Cunningnesses could go about their
business and never show so much as the tip of an ear to any human eye.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and many of the prairie people were
not yet risen from their noon-day sleep. Presently, over the high butte
to the north, he saw a buzzard on wide motionless wings, "sitting" in
the blue. The circles he made were so immensely wide and slow that he
scarcely seemed to move in that high watch-tower of the air where he
scanned the world for carrion. Next, a pair of hawks came into sight,
skimming above the clumps of sage and bunch-grass. And now Dusty Star
knew by their busy flight that the smaller prairie folk had begun to
follow the runways in their eager search for food. Then, as he watched,
came a flash between the sage bushes, as a jack-rabbit dashed to feed on
the juicy leaves that grew under the alder thicket by the stream.

After that, nothing happened for some time, until suddenly he saw
something very far off that was like the figure of a horseman riding
over a swell. It was only visible, for a moment or two before it
disappeared, but Dusty Star's piercing eyes had seen it long enough to
make him sure that it was Running Wolf, his father, returning from the
chase. The boy looked eagerly for his father's reappearance. He had been
gone for some time. Whenever Running Wolf returned from good hunting he
always brought much game with him, and there was feasting many days.
When Running Wolf came into sight again, he was so close home that Dusty
Star could make out quite clearly the form of a buck lying across the
pony's shoulders. Also, his father carried something small and dark that
cuddled against his left side. When Running Wolf had reached the tepee
and Dusty Star had seen what it was that he had brought home, and when
he had finally realized that the little wolf-cub was to be his very own,
there were no bounds to his delight. To be the owner of a cub that would
one day be a grown-up wolf--_this_ was a thing beyond his wildest
dreams!

Henceforward the cub was the centre of his little world. He called it
Kiopo, because that was a name that meant for him all sorts of wolfish
things, which he could not otherwise express and which he could never
have explained to anyone grown-up; which, indeed, he could not explain
even to Kiopo himself. He talked to Kiopo a good deal, and when he was
not telling him of mat