ftly, silently she followed
their steps; found the old trails coming up and the fresh trails
returning; then, sure at last that no danger threatened her own little
ones, she loped away up the hill and over the topmost ridge to the
caribou barrens and the thickets where young rabbits were already
stirring about in the twilight.

That night, in the cabin under the cliffs, Old Tomah had to rehearse
again all the wolf lore learned in sixty years of hunting: how,
fortunately for the deer, these enormous wolves had never been abundant
and were now very rare, a few having been shot, and more poisoned in the
starving times, and the rest having vanished, mysteriously as wolves do,
for some unknown reason. Bears, which are easily trapped and shot and
whose skins are worth each a month's wages to the fishermen, still hold
their own and even increase on the great island; while the wolves, once
more numerous, are slowly vanishing, though they are never hunted, and
not even Old Tomah himself could set a trap cunningly enough to catch
one. The old hunter told, while Mooka and Noel held their breaths and
drew closer to the light, how once, when he made his camp alone under a
cliff on the lake shore, seven huge wolves, white as the snow, came
racing swift and silent over the ice straight at the fire which he had
barely time to kindle; how he shot two, and the others, seizing the fish
he had just caught through the ice for his own supper, vanished over the
bank; and he could not say even now whether they meant him harm or no.
Again, as he talked and the grim old face lighted up at the memory, they
saw him crouched with his sledge-dogs by a blazing fire all the long
winter night, and around him in the darkness blazing points of light,
the eyes of wolves flashing back the firelight, and gaunt white forms
flitting about like shadows, drawing nearer and nearer with ever-growing
boldness till they seized his largest dog--though the brute lay so near
the fire that his hair singed--and whisked it away with an appalling
outcry. And still again, when Tomah was lost three days in the interior,
they saw him wandering with his pack over endless barrens and through
gloomy spruce woods, and near him all the time a young wolf that
followed his steps quietly, with half-friendly interest, and came no
nearer day or night.

All these things and many more the children heard from Old Tomah, and
among all his hunting experiences and the stories and legends w