whispering in the balsams, singing gently its age-old song of
loneliness, of desolation, of mystery, and Mukoki straightened himself
and looked to where the red glow of the moon was rising above the
mountain. After a little he rose to his feet, took his rifle,
and climbed to the summit of the ridge, with a thousand miles of
wilderness sweeping between him and the Arctic sea somewhere out there
in that wilderness--was Wolf!

The moon rose higher. It disclosed the old Indian, as rigid as a rock,
with his back to a white, barkless tree in which the sap had run dry a
generation before. As he stood there he heard a sound, and turned his
face toward it, a sound that came from a mass of tumbled boulders,
like the falling of a small rock upon a larger one. And as he looked
there came from the darkness of the boulders a flash of fire and the
explosion of a gun, and as Mukoki crumpled down in his tracks there
followed a cry so terrible, so unhuman, so blood-curdling that, as
he fell, an answering cry of horror burst from the lips of the old
warrior. He lay like dead, though he was not touched. Instinct more
than reason had impelled him to fall at the sound of the mysterious
shot. Cautiously he wormed his rifle to his shoulder. But there came
no movement from the rocks.

Then, from half-way down the mountain, there came again that terrible
cry, and Mukoki knew that no animal in all these wilds could make it,
but that it was human, and yet more savage than anything that had ever
brought terror into his soul. Trembling, he crouched to the earth, a
nameless fear chilling the blood in his veins. And the cry came again,
and yet again, always farther and farther away, now at the foot of
the mountain, now upon the plain, now floating away toward the chasm,
echoing and reechoing between the mountain ridges, startling the