followed Baree without hesitation; now
there was a gathering strangeness and indecision in her manner, and
twice she stopped and would have let Baree go on without her.

An hour after they entered the plain there came suddenly out of the
west the tonguing of the wolf pack. It was not far distant, probably
not more than a mile along the foot of the ridge, and the sharp, quick
yapping that followed the first outburst was evidence that the
long-fanged hunters had put up sudden game, a caribou or young moose,
and were close at its heels. At the voice of her own people Maheegun
laid her ears close to her head and was off like an arrow from a bow.

The unexpectedness of her movement and the swiftness of her flight put
Baree well behind her in the race over the plain. She was running
blindly, favored by luck. For an interval of perhaps five minutes the
pack were so near to their game that they made no sound, and the chase
swung full into the face of Maheegun and Baree. The latter was not half
a dozen lengths behind the young wolf when a crashing in the brush
directly ahead stopped them so sharply that they tore up the snow with
their braced forefeet and squat haunches. Ten seconds later a caribou
burst through and flashed across a clearing not more than twenty yards
from where they stood. They could hear its swift panting as it
disappeared. And then came the pack.

At sight of those swiftly moving gray bodies Baree's heart leaped for
an instant into his throat. He forgot Maheegun, and that she had run
away from him. The moon and the stars went out of existence for him. He
no longer sensed the chill of the snow under his feet. He was wolf--all
wolf. With the warm scent of the caribou in his nostrils, and the
passion to kill sweeping through him like fire, he darted after the
pack.

Even at that, Maheegun was a bit ahead of him. He did not miss her. In
the excitement of his first chase he no longer felt the desire to have
her at his side. Very soon he found himself close to the flanks of one
of the gray monsters of the pack. Half a minute later a new hunter
swept in from the bush behind him, and then a second, and after that a
third. At times he was running shoulder to shoulder with his new
companions. He heard the whining excitement in their throats; the snap
of their jaws as they ran--and in the golden moonlight ahead of him the
sound of a caribou as it plunged through thickets and over windfalls in
its race for life.