some subtle excitement in the air that was not there before, and only
the two Indian children were left keeping watch over the great wild
hillside.

For over an hour they lay there expectantly, but nothing stirred near
the den; then they too slipped away, silently as the little wild things,
and made their slow way down the brook, hand in hand in the deepening
shadows. Scarcely had they gone when the bushes stirred and the old
she-wolf, that had been ranging every ridge and valley since she
disappeared at the unknown alarm, glided over the spot where a moment
before Mooka and Noel had been watching. Swiftly, 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