the thunder of the
falls, the night was very still. He stood upon the ledge before the
cave, looking down upon the wilderness, mysterious and alluring in the
moonlight, and the sight affected him strangely.

Suddenly there came to his ears a long-drawn howl. At the sound,
indescribably lonely and wild, the hair rose upon the back of the young
wolf and his eyes gleamed. It was the summons of the leader to the pack
and, though the cub knew nothing of its meaning, his heart instinctively
thrilled to it.

There was a moment of silence. Then, from far diverging points, the cry
was taken up as the various members of the pack rallied to the call of
their leader. The cub's heart swelled with a new and strange emotion.
The next moment, high on his rocky ledge, he lifted his muzzle to the
moon and sent out his own answer. The call was lost in the roar of the
cataract, but from that night the white cub felt his kinship with the
pack of which he was one day to become the leader.

[Illustration: High on his rocky ledge he lifted his muzzle to the moon.]

Time passed, and the white cub was no longer a cub but a grown wolf,
unexcelled for fleetness of foot and strength of muscle. His mother and
the other cub had long since joined the pack, but for some reason the
white wolf kept to himself. When the rallying call reached his ears on
a still winter night, it ran like fire through his veins; yet he did not
answer the call and morning invariably found him curled up in the old
den, high on the shoulder of Scarface. Occasionally he was sighted by a
lone hunter who returned to the settlements with tales of the great
white wolf of the mountain, tales which grew from lip to lip until the
animal had attained gigantic proportions. And still the white wolf
traveled alone.

Then one night, when the wilderness lay in the merciless grip of winter,
and famine stalked the trails, the white wolf joined the pack. It came
about in this wise.

Gray Wolf, leader of the pack, had taken up the trail of a lynx. In an
encounter between the two, the latter would scarcely have been a match
for the big wolf; but it chanced that soon after Gray Wolf sprang to the
attack, the mate of the lynx appeared and joined the fray. Thus the wolf
became the victim of a double set of raking claws and sharp teeth. He
fought savagely but the claws of the male lynx gashed him horribly from
beneath, while its mate bit and tore from above.

The double punishment was too mu