et Julie. And
the spring would see them married. Well, he should go on loving her--and
Fleur; there was no one else.

CHAPTER XI

THE WARNING IN THE WIND

One afternoon toward the end of the year when the early dusk had turned
Marcel back toward camp from his most northerly line of marten traps, he
suddenly stopped in his tracks on the ridge from which he had seen the
lake on the Salmon headwaters the spring previous. Pushing back the hood
of his caribou capote to free his ears, he listened, motionless. Beside
him, with black nostrils quivering, Fleur sniffed the stinging air.

Again the faint, far, wailing chorus which had checked him, reached
Marcel's ears. The dog stiffened, her mane rising as she bared her white
fangs.

"You heard it too, Fleur?" muttered the man, softly, resting a
rabbit-skin mitten on the broad head of the nervous husky. Marcel gazed
long at the floor of snow to the north through wind-whipped ridges.

"Ah-hah!" he exclaimed, "dey turn dees way." Clearer now the stiff
breeze carried the call of the hunting wolves. Fleur burst into a frenzy
of yelping. Seizing the dog, Marcel calmed her into silence. Then, after
an interval, the cry of the pack slowly faded, and shortly, the man's
straining ears caught no sound save the fretting of the wind through the
spruce.

Wolves he had often heard, singly, and in groups of four and five, but
the hunting howl which had been brought to him through the hills by the
wind, he knew was not the clamor of a handful of timber-wolves, but the
blood chorus of a pack. None but the white-wolves which, far to the
north, hung on the flanks of the caribou herds could raise such a
hunting cry and there was but one reason for their drifting south from
the great Ungava barrens.

It was a sober face that Jean Marcel wore back to his camp. Large
numbers of arctic wolves in the country meant the departure of the
trapper's chief source of meat--the caribou. With the caribou gone, they
had their limited supply of fish, and the rabbits, eked out by the
flour, which would not carry them far, for the half-breeds, in spite of
his warnings, had already consumed half of it. To be sure, the rabbits
would pull them through to the "break-up" of the long snows in April;
would keep them from actual starvation. Then he cursed his partners for
failing to make themselves independent of meat by netting more fish in
September.

"To-morrow," said Marcel, on his return next day to