A dozen rods out from the tamaracks he stopped, head thrown high, long
ears pitched forward, and nostrils held half to the sky. It is in this
attitude that a moose listens when he hears a trout splash
three-quarters of a mile away. Now there was only the vast, unending
silence, broken only by the mournful hoot of the snow owl on the other
side of the lake. Still the great beast stood immovable, a little pool
of blood growing upon the snow under his forward legs. What was the
mystery that lurked in the blackness of yonder forest? Was it danger?
The keenest of human hearing would have detected nothing. Yet to those
long slender ears of the bull moose, slanting beyond the heavy plates of
his horns, there came a sound. The animal lifted his head still higher
to the sky, sniffed to the east, to the west, and back to the shadows of
the tamaracks. But it was the north that held him.

From beyond that barrier of spruce there soon came a sound that man
might have heard--neither the beginning nor the end of a wail, but
something like it. Minute by minute it came more clearly, now growing in
volume, now almost dying away, but every instant approaching--the
distant hunting call of the wolf-pack! What the hangman's noose is to
the murderer, what the leveled rifles are to the condemned spy, that
hunt-cry of the wolves is to the wounded animal of the forests.

Instinct taught this to the old bull. His head dropped, his huge antlers
leveled themselves with his shoulders, and he set off at a slow trot
toward the east. He was taking chances in thus crossing the open, but to
him the spruce forest was home, and there he might find refuge. In his
brute brain he reasoned that he could get there before the wolves broke
cover. And then--

Again he stopped, so suddenly that his forward legs doubled under him