oung Indian brother who made
medicine with his feet.

Circling about him, leaping over him, chasing each other in bewildering
circles, snarling, snapping, barking, howling, the united packs swept
round the plateau in a roaring, rushing storm.

In that tumultuous sea of wolf-bodies, Dusty Star was engulfed. He
scarcely knew what was happening. He had been in a dream before. Now he
was swept far out of himself into an even wilder dream--into places
where the moon herself danced the wolf-dance and the stars yelped at her
heels.

How long the dance continued he did not know. He saw the writhing
wolf-forms on every hand. He was dimly conscious that Kiopo was
continually at his side. What he knew was, that now, at last, he had
entered the great mystery; he was making the medicine of the wolves.

And so, in the white moon-glare, among the lonely buttes, the fierce
wild creatures gave their leaping bodies to the dance that had been seen
by no man since the beginning of the world.

CHAPTER XXVI

HOW THE WOLVES CLOSED IN

How the dance came to an end, and what happened when it did, Dusty Star
never fully remembered. All he could recollect was that he found himself
lying on the flat of his back, with Kiopo standing over him licking his
face and hands with his large tongue. His wandering senses came back to
him, and he sat up. All around, the wolves sat or lay with their tongues
hanging out, panting after their exertions. In the centre, the white
wolf sat as before, as if he had never moved. And the moon was there,
and the stars, which also seemed to be panting, only they were too far
off to see what they did with their tongues.

After that, Dusty Star did the only wise thing to do in his state of
exhaustion. He gave himself up to the stillness, and let himself fall
asleep. When he awoke, the moon had set, and dawn had risen over the
buttes. Kiopo lay facing him with his head between his paws, watching
till he should wake. Dusty Star looked for the pack. Not a single wolf
was in sight. They had melted away into the barren gullies of the Bad
Lands, as if they had been a dream. But the Bad Lands remained, and
Kiopo, and an odd feeling in his bones; and Dusty Star knew that now the
great journey must continue that could only end where the prairies were
yellow with the East.

When the sun had lifted himself above the horizon, the travellers had
already reached the last buttes of the Bad Lands, and saw the prairies
s