It was covered with blood and hair, and all at once Gray Wolf lay back on her haunches and turned her blind face to the sky, and there rose from her throat a cry for Kazan that drifted for miles on the wings of the south wind.  Never had Gray Wolf given quite that cry before.  It was not the “call” that comes with the moonlit nights, and neither was it the hunt-cry, nor the she-wolf’s yearning for matehood.  It carried with it the lament of death.  And after that one cry Gray Wolf slunk back to the fringe of bush over the river, and lay with her face turned to the stream.

A strange terror fell upon her.  She had grown accustomed to darkness, but never before had she been alone in that darkness.  Always there had been the guardianship of Kazan’s presence.  She heard the clucking sound of a spruce hen in the bush a few yards away, and now that sound came to her as if from out of another world.  A ground-mouse rustled through the grass close to her forepaws, and she snapped at it, and closed her teeth on a rock.  The muscles of her shoulders twitched tremulously and she shivered as if stricken by intense cold.  She was terrified by the darkness that shut out the world from her, and she pawed at her closed eyes, as if she might open them to light.  Early in the afternoon she wandered back on the plain.  It was different.  It frightened her, and soon she returned to the beach, and snuggled down under the tree where Kazan had lain.  She was not so frightened here.  The smell of Kazan was strong about her.  For an hour she lay motionless, with her head resting on the club clotted with his hair and blood.  Night found her still there.  And when the moon and the stars came out she crawled back into the pit in the white sand that Kazan’s body had made under the tree.

With dawn she went down to the edge of the stream to drink.  She could not see that the day was almost as dark as night, and that the gray-black sky was a chaos of slumbering storm.  But she could smell the presence of it in the thick air, and could feel the forked flashes of lightning that rolled up with the dense pall from the south and west.  The distant rumbling of thunder grew louder, and she huddled herself again under the tree.  For hours the storm crashed over her, and the rain fell in a deluge.  When it had finished she slunk out from her shelter like a thing beaten.  Vainly she sought for one last scent of Kazan.  The club was washed clean.  Again the sand was white where Kazan’s blood had reddened it.  Even under the tree there was no sign of him left.

Until now only the terror of being alone in the pit of darkness that enveloped her had oppressed Gray Wolf.  With afternoon came hunger.  It was this hunger that drew her from the sand-bar, and she wandered back into the plain.  A dozen times she scented game, and each time it evaded her.  Even a ground-mouse that she cornered under a root, and dug out with her paws, escaped her fangs.