trail must end here,
for they could go no farther; but somewhere ahead in the vast silent
barren the cubs were trailing, and somewhere beyond them the old mother
wolf was laying her ambush.--Hark! from a spur of the valley, far below
on their left, rang out the food cry, singing its way in the frosty air
over woods and plains, and hurrying back over the trail to tell those
who had fallen by the way that they were not forgotten. And when they
leaped up, as at an electric shock, and raced for the cry, there were
the cubs and the mother wolf, their hunger already satisfied, and there
in the snow a young bull caribou to save them.

So the long, hard winter passed away, and spring came again with its
abundance. Grouse drummed a welcome in the woods; the _honk_ of wild
geese filled the air with a joyous clangor, and in every open pool the
ducks were quacking. No need now to cling like shadows to the herds of
caribou, and no further need for the pack to hold together. The ties
that held them melted like snows in the sunny hollows. First the old
wolves, then the cubs, one by one drifted away whither the game or their
new mates were calling them. When the summer came there was another den
on the high hill overlooking the harbor, where the little brown cubs
could look down with wonder at the shining sea and the slow
fishing-boats and the children playing on the shore; but the wolves
whose trail began there were far away over the mountains, following
their own ways, waiting for the crisp hunting cry that should bring them
again together.

_Trails that Cross in the Snow_

"Are we lost, little brother?" said Mooka, shivering.

No need of the question, startling and terrible as it was from the lips
of a child astray in the vast solitudes; for a great gale had swooped
down from the Arctic, blotting out in clouds of whirling snow the world
of plain and mountain and forest that, a moment before, had stretched
wide and still before the little hunters' eyes.

For an hour or more, running like startled deer, they had tried to
follow their own snow-shoe trail back over the wide barrens into the
friendly woods; but already the snow had filled it brim full, and
whatever faint trace was left of the long raquettes was caught up by the
gale and whirled away with a howl of exultation. Before them as they ran
every trail of wolf and caribou and snow-shoe, and every distant
landmark, had vanished; the world was but a chaos of mad rolling s