and so he accepted circumspection as the better part of valor and held
himself aloof from the perils of darkness. It was a strange instinct
that made him seek his bed on the top of a huge rock up which he had
some difficulty in climbing. Perhaps it was a harkening back to the
days of long ago when Gray Wolf, in her first motherhood, sought refuge
at the summit of the Sun Rock which towered high above the forest world
of which she and Kazan were a part, and where later she was blinded in
her battle with the lynx.

Baree's rock, instead of rising for a hundred feet or more straight up,
was possibly as high as a man's head. It was in the edge of the creek
bottom, with the spruce forest close at his back. For many hours he did
not sleep, but lay keenly alert, his ears tuned to catch every sound
that came out of the dark world about him. There was more than
curiosity in his alertness tonight. His education had broadened
immensely in one way: he had learned that he was a very small part of
all this wonderful earth that lay under the stars and the moon, and he
was keenly alive with the desire to become better acquainted with it
without any more fighting or hurt. Tonight he knew what it meant when
he saw now and then gray shadows float silently out of the forest into
the moonlight--the owls, monsters of the breed with which he had
fought. He heard the crackling of hoofed feet and the smashing of heavy
bodies in the underbrush. He heard again the mooing of the moose.
Voices came to him that he had not heard before--the sharp yap-yap-yap
of a fox, the unearthly, laughing cry of a great Northern loon on a
lake half a mile away, the scream of a lynx that came floating through
miles of forest, the low, soft croaks of the nighthawks between himself
and the stars. He heard strange whisperings in the
treetops--whisperings of the wind. And once, in the heart of a dead
stillness, a buck whistled shrilly close behind his rock--and at the