again at every swift chance; but here he must either hold fast
or lose his big game; and what between holding and letting go, as the
seals whirled with bared teeth and snapped viciously in turn, as they
scrambled away to the sea, the wolves had a lively time of it. Often
indeed, spite of three or four wolves, a big seal would tumble into the
tide, where the sharks followed his bloody trail and soon finished him.

Now for the first time the wolves, led by the rich abundance, began to
kill more than they needed for food and to hide it away, like the
squirrels, in anticipation of the coming winter. Like the blue and the
Arctic foxes, a strange instinct to store things seems to stir dimly at
times within them. Occasionally, instead of eating and sleeping after a
kill, the cubs, led by the mother wolf, would hunt half of the day and
night and carry all they caught to the snow-fields. There each one would
search out a cranny in the rocks and hide his game, covering it over
deeply with snow to kill the scent of it from the prowling foxes. Then
for days at a time they would forget the coming winter, and play as
heedlessly as if the woods would always be as full of game as now; and
again the mood would be upon them strongly, and they would kill all they
could find and hide it in another place. But the instinct--if indeed it
were instinct, and not the natural result of the mother's own
experience--was weak at best; and the first time the cubs were hungry or
lazy they would trail off to the hidden store. Long before the spring
with its bitter need was upon them they had eaten everything, and had
returned to the empty storehouse at least a dozen times, as a dog goes
again and again to the place where he once hid a bone, and nosed it all
over regretfully to be quite sure that they had overlooked nothing.

More interesting to the wolves in these glad days than the game or the
storehouse, or the piles of caplin which they cached under the sand on
the shore, were the wandering herds of caribou,--splendid old stags with
massive antlers, and long-legged, inquisitive fawns trotting after the
sleek cows, whose heads carried small pointed horns, more deadly by far
than the stags' cumbersome antlers. Wherever the wolves went they
crossed the trails of these wanderers swarming out of the thickets,
sometimes by twos and threes, and again in straggling, endless lines
converging upon the vast open barrens where the caribou gathered to
select th