To Baree, for many days after he was born, the world was a vast gloomy
cavern.

During these first days of his life his home was in the heart of a
great windfall where Gray Wolf, his blind mother, had found a safe nest
for his babyhood, and to which Kazan, her mate, came only now and then,
his eyes gleaming like strange balls of greenish fire in the darkness.
It was Kazan's eyes that gave to Baree his first impression of
something existing away from his mother's side, and they brought to him
also his discovery of vision. He could feel, he could smell, he could
hear--but in that black pit under the fallen timber he had never seen
until the eyes came. At first they frightened him; then they puzzled
him, and his fear changed to an immense curiosity. He would be looking
straight at them, when all at once they would disappear. This was when
Kazan turned his head. And then they would flash back at him again out
of the darkness with such startling suddenness that Baree would
involuntarily shrink closer to his mother, who always trembled and
shivered in a strange sort of way when Kazan came in.

Baree, of course, would never know their story. He would never know
that Gray Wolf, his mother, was a full-blooded wolf, and that Kazan,
his father, was a dog. In him nature was already beginning its
wonderful work, but it would never go beyond certain limitations. It
would tell him, in time, that his beautiful wolf mother was blind, but
he would never know of that terrible battle between Gray Wolf and the
lynx in which his mother's sight had been destroyed. Nature could tell
him nothing of Kazan's merciless vengeance, of the wonderful years of
their matehood, of their loyalty, their strange adventures in the great
Canadian wilderness--it could make him only a son of Kazan.