"You believe that, Mukoki?"

"Wolf gone!"

"But animals think, don't they?" persisted Rod, to whom the discussion
was of absorbing interest. "They reason, they remember!"

"They do all of that," replied Wabi, "and more. I have read certain
so-called natural history stories which ridiculed the idea of wild
animals possessing mental abilities, and which ascribed pretty nearly
all their actions to instinct. Such stories are as wrong as those
which give wild animals human endowments. Animals do think. Don't you
suppose that mother moose was thinking when she stopped out there in
the plain? Wasn't she turning the situation over in her mind, if you
want to speak of it as that, and mentally figuring just where the
danger lay, and in which direction she ought to take flight? And
besides reason wild animals have instinct. One proof of this is their
sixth sense; the sense of--of--what do you call it?"

"Orientation?" assisted Rod.

"Yes; that's it. Orientation. A bear, for instance, doesn't carry
a compass with him, as some nature writers would like to have you
believe, and yet he can go from this mountain to a den a hundred miles
away as straight as a bird can fly. That's instinct."

"Then Wolf--" mused Rod slowly.

"Is with the hunt pack," finished the young Indian.