bushes to a horizon that is already dim in the steel
grays of twilight.

Half a mile down this openway, off the homeward route of his traps, a
wolfish figure looms black against the snow--and stands! The dog prances
round and round as if he would hold the creature for his master's shot;
and the Indian calculates--" After all, there is only one."

What a chance to approach it under cover, as it has approached his
traps! The stars are already pricking the blue darkness in cold, steel
points; and the Northern Lights are swinging through the gloom like
mystic censers to an invisible Spirit, the Spirit of the still, white,
wide, northern wastes. It is as clear as day.

One thought of his loss at the fox trap sends the Indian flitting
through the underwoods like a hunted partridge. The sharp barkings of
the dog increase in fury, and when the trapper emerges in the open, he
finds the wolf has straggled a hundred yards farther. That was the
meaning of the dog's alarm. Going back to cover, the hunter again
advances. But the wolf keeps moving leisurely, and each time the man
sights his game it is still out of range for the old-fashioned musket.
The man runs faster now, determined to get abreast of the wolf and
utterly heedless of the increasing danger, as each step puts greater
distance between him and his lodge. He will pass the wolf, come out in
front and shoot.

But when he comes to the edge of the woods to get his aim, there is no
wolf, and the dog is barking furiously at his own moonlit shadow. The
wolf, after the fashion of his kind, has apparently disappeared into the
ground, just as he always seems to rise from the earth. The trapper
thinks of the "loup-garou," but no wolf-demon of native legend devoured
the very real substance of that fox.

The dog stops barking, gives a whine and skulks to his master's feet,
while the trapper becomes suddenly aware of low-crouching forms gliding
through the underbrush. Eyes look out of the dark in the flash of green
lights from a prism. The figures are in hiding, but the moon is shining
with a silvery clearness that throws moving wolf shadows on the snow to
the trapper's very feet.

Then the man knows that he has been tricked.

The Indian knows the wolf-pack too well to attempt flight from these
sleuths of the forest. He knows, too, one thing that wolves of forest
and prairie hold in deadly fear--fire. Two or three shots ring into the
darkness followed by a yelping howl, which