and elected to remain at the cottage where first he had killed the
rabbit and slept by the spring. Even after that, a long time elapsed
before the man and woman succeeded in patting him. It was a great
victory, for they alone were allowed to put hands on him. He was
fastidiously exclusive, and no guest at the cottage ever succeeded in
making up to him. A low growl greeted such approach; if any one had the
hardihood to come nearer, the lips lifted, the naked fangs appeared, and
the growl became a snarl--a snarl so terrible and malignant that it awed
the stoutest of them, as it likewise awed the farmers' dogs that knew
ordinary dog snarling, but had never seen wolf snarling before.

He was without antecedents. His history began with Walt and Madge. He
had come up from the south, but never a clew did they get of the owner
from whom he had evidently fled. Mrs. Johnson, their nearest neighbor
and the one who supplied them with milk, proclaimed him a Klondike dog.
Her brother was burrowing for frozen pay-streaks in that far country,
and so she constituted herself an authority on the subject.

But they did not dispute her. There were the tips of Wolf's ears,
obviously so severely frozen at some time that they would never quite
heal again. Besides, he looked like the photographs of the Alaskan dogs
they saw published in magazines and newspapers. They often speculated
over his past, and tried to conjure up (from what they had read and
heard) what his northland life had been. That the northland still drew
him, they knew; for at night they sometimes heard him crying softly; and
when the north wind blew and the bite of frost was in the air, a great
restlessness would come upon him and he would lift a mournful lament
which they knew to be the long wolf-howl. Yet he never barked. No
provocation was great enough to draw from him that canine cry.