ng each other's hands tight lest
they separate and be lost by the way.

The second winter had come, sealing up the gloomy land till it rang like
iron at the touch, then covering it deep with snow and polishing its
mute white face with hoar-frost and hail driven onward by the fierce
Arctic gales. An appalling silence rested on plains and mountains. Not a
chirp, not a rustle broke the intense, unnatural stillness. One might
travel all day long without a sight or sound of life; and when the early
twilight came and life stirred shyly from its coverts and snow caves,
the Wood Folk stole out into the bare white world on noiseless,
hesitating feet, as if in presence of the dead.

When the Moon of Famine came, the silence was rudely broken. Before
daylight one morning, when the air was so tense and still that a whisper
set it tinkling like silver bells, the rallying cry of the wolves rolled
down from a mountain top; and the three cubs, that had waited long for
the signal, left their separate trails far away and hurried to join the
old leader.

When the sun rose that morning one who stood on the high ridge of the
Top Gallants, far to the eastward of Harbor Weal, would have seen seven
trails winding down among the rocks and thickets. It needed only a
glance to show that the seven trails, each one as clear-cut and delicate
as that of a prowling fox, were the records of wolves' cautious feet;
and that they were no longer beating the thickets for grouse and
rabbits, but moving swiftly all together for the edges of the vast
barrens where the caribou herds were feeding. Another glance--but here
we must have the cunning eyes of Old Tomah the hunter--would have told
that two of the trails were those of enormous wolves which led the pack;
two others were plainly cubs that had not yet lost the cub trick of
frolicking in the soft snow; while three others were just wolves, big
and powerful brutes that moved as if on steel springs, and that still
held to the old pack because the time had not yet come for them to
scatter finally to their separate ways and head new packs of their own
in the great solitudes.

Out from the woods on the other side of the barren came two snow-shoe
trails, which advanced with short steps and rested lightly on the snow,
as if the makers of the trails were little people whose weight on the
snow-shoes made hardly more impression than the broad pads of Moktaques
the rabbit. They followed stealthily the winding reco