wastes of the barrens, and in the dark and mysterious fastnesses of the
forest it crouches, always ready for its chance to spring forward and
meet you unawares. Adventure, ay, and grave danger too, are wont to show
themselves unexpectedly. And so, one winter's evening, they came to
Skipper Ed and Bobby and Jimmy.




CHAPTER VII

THE WOLF PACK


In seasons when caribou were plentiful along the coast, wolves were also
plentiful, for it is the habit of wolves in this land to follow the
trail of the caribou herds and prey upon the stragglers. And so it was
that sometimes of a winter's night the silence of the hills was startled
by the distant howl of wolves. And always Skipper Ed's dogs and Abel's
dogs would answer the wild, weird cries of their untamed kin of the
hills with equally weird cries, their muzzles in the air and the
long-drawn notes rising and falling in woful and dismal cadence.

Perhaps the dogs were possessed of an uninterpreted longing to join
their brothers of the wilderness in their care-free wanderings, and be
forever free themselves from the yoke of sledge and whip and the toil
and drudgery of the trail. But so like men were the beasts that they
never had the courage to cast themselves free from the shackles of their
man-master, though it required but a resolution and a plunge into the
hills.