city for happiness depends largely on how
deeply one has suffered. One's hard luck and misfortune form the
measuring stick for future good luck and fortune. So it was with Baree.
Forty-eight hours ago a full stomach would not have made him a tenth
part as happy as he was now. Then his greatest longing was for his
mother. Since then a still greater yearning had come into his life--for
food. In a way it was fortunate for him that he had almost died of
exhaustion and starvation, for his experience had helped to make a man
of him--or a wolf dog, just as you are of a mind to put it. He would
miss his mother for a long time. But he would never miss her again as
he had missed her yesterday and the day before.

That afternoon Baree took a long nap close to his cache. Then he
uncovered the partridge and ate his supper. When his fourth night alone
came, he did not hide himself as he had done on the three preceding
nights. He was strangely and curiously alert. Under the moon and the
stars he prowled in the edge of the forest and out on the burn. He
listened with a new kind of thrill to the faraway cry of a wolf pack on
the hunt. He listened to the ghostly whoo-whoo-whoo of the owls without
shivering. Sounds and silences were beginning to hold a new and
significant note for him.

For another day and night Baree remained in the vicinity of his cache.
When the last bone was picked, he moved on. He now entered a country
where subsistence was no longer a perilous problem for him. It was a
lynx country, and where there are lynx, there are also a great many
rabbits. When the rabbits thin out, the lynx emigrate to better hunting
grounds. As the snowshoe rabbit breeds all the summer through, Baree
found himself in a land of plenty. It was not difficult for him to
catch and kill the young rabbits. For a week he prospered and grew
bigger and stronger each day. But all the time, stirred by that
seeking, wanderlust spirit--still hoping to find the old home and his
mother--he traveled into the north and east.

And this was straight into the trapping country of Pierrot, the
half-breed.

Pierrot, until two years ago, had believed himself to be one of the
most fortunate men in the big wilderness. That was before La Mort
Rouge--the Red Death--came. He was half French, and he had married a
Cree chief's daughter, and in their log cabin on the Gray Loon they had
lived for many years in great prosperity and happiness. Pierrot was
proud of three th