o help; till, all
of a sudden, it occurred to them what a glorious opportunity his
upside-downness presented to them, and rolled down upon him in a body.
During the scuffle which followed, the old mother sat and watched with
admiring love. When the babies rolled over on their backs, or came to
mimic disaster with roots or stones, she let them recover themselves as
best they could, and learn by experience what were the hard things in
the world and what the soft. And when she considered they had been long
enough out of doors, she packed them back to bed again, and went off to
hunt.

The cubs had played out of doors many times, and had grown quite used to
the look of the bramble-brakes and the great thorns, and that immense
hot roundness that went dazzling down behind the western peaks, when,
one evening, the wolf-mother came upon a strange trail. Of all the
creatures upon Carboona there was not one with whose body-scent and
foot-scent she was not familiar. When the merest ghosts of scent came
wafting along the tides of the summer air, her nose disentangled them
delicately and never gave the right smell to the wrong owner. But the
smell of the strange trail puzzled her. It belonged to neither bear,
badger, fox, wolf, lynx nor caribou. It was buckskin, and yet not wholly
buckskin; it was buckskin with something inside it which certainly was
not buck.

The strange trail did not cross the brakes. That was fortunate, but it
came dangerously near their northern extremity, and then turned east.
The wolf followed it for a long distance till it passed out of her home
range, and then slowly retraced it through the darkening spruce woods,
sniffing suspiciously as she went. A week later she hit upon the trail
again. This time the smell was fainter, but the trail itself was more
disturbing: it actually touched the upper slopes where the junipers went
black against the moon.

Three nights later Carboona's watching eyes saw an unaccustomed sight.
They saw a gaunt grey shape pass silently and swiftly between the
junipers in the light of the setting moon. From the jaws of the shape, a
wolf-cub hung, very limp--swaying a little as its bearer trotted.

Past the junipers, past the beds of wild raspberries, over the
granite-covered shoulder of the hill, deep into the black heart of the
spruce woods, the old wolf went. She knew her way, though her eyes saw
no trail. She had passed that way before, during the days and nights
when her heart