of a cub wolf playing came faintly across the barren.

It was a strange scene, yet one often witnessed on the lonely plains of
the far North: the caribou halting, running away, and halting again to
look back and watch the queer antics of their big enemies, which seemed
now so playful and harmless; the cunning wolves playing on the game's
curiosity at every turn, knowing well that if once frightened the deer
would break away at a pace which would make pursuit hopeless. So they
followed rather than drove the foolish deer across the barren, holding
them with monkey tricks and kitten's capers, and restraining with an
iron grip their own fearful hunger and the blind impulse to rush in
headlong and have it all quickly over.

Kneeling behind a big spruce, Noel was trying nervously the spring and
temper of his long bow, divided in desire between the caribou, which
they needed sadly at home, and one of the great wolves whose death would
give him a place among the mighty hunters, when Mooka clutched his arm,
her eyes snapping with excitement, her finger pointing silently back on
their own trail. A vague shadow glided swiftly among the trees. An
enormous white wolf appeared, vanished, came near them again, and
crouched down under a low spruce branch waiting.

Again the two trails had crossed in the snow. The big wolf as he
appeared had thrust his nose into the snow-shoe tracks, and a sniff or
two told him everything,--who had passed, and how long ago, and what
they were doing, and how far ahead they were now waiting. But the
caribou were coming, coaxed along marvelously by the cubs and the old
mother; and the great silent wolf, that had left the pack playing with
the game while he circled the barren at top speed, now turned to the
business in hand with no thought nor fear of harm from the two children
whom he had watched but yesterday.

Not so Noel. The fire blazed out in his eyes; the long bow swung to the
wolf, bending like a steel spring, and the feathered shaft of an arrow
lay close against the boy's cheek. But Mooka caught his arm--

"Look, Noel, his ear! _Malsunsis_, my little wolf cub," she breathed
excitedly. And Noel, with a great wonder in his eyes, slacked his bow,
while his thoughts jumped far away to the den on the mountains where the
trail began, and to three little cubs playing like kittens with the
grasshoppers and the cloud shadows; for the great wolf that lay so still
near them, his eyes fixed in a steady gl