Gray Wolf, his wild mate, lay near him, flat on her belly, her forepaws reaching out, her eyes and nostrils as keen and alert as the smell of man could make them.  For there was that smell of man, as well as of balsam and spruce, in the warm spring air.  She gazed anxiously and sometimes steadily, at Kazan as he slept.  Her own gray spine stiffened when she saw the tawny hair along Kazan’s back bristle at some dream vision.  She whined softly as his upper lip snarled back, showing his long white fangs.  But for the most part Kazan lay quiet, save for the muscular twitchings of legs, shoulders and muzzle, which always tell when a dog is dreaming; and as he dreamed there came to the door of the cabin out on the plain a blue-eyed girl-woman, with a big brown braid over her shoulder, who called through the cup of her hands, “Kazan, Kazan, Kazan!”

The voice reached faintly to the top of the Sun Rock, and Gray Wolf flattened her ears.  Kazan stirred, and in another instant he was awake and on his feet.  He leaped to an outcropping ledge, sniffing the air and looking far out over the plain that lay below them.

Over the plain the woman’s voice came to them again, and Kazan ran to the edge of the rock and whined.  Gray Wolf stepped softly to his side and laid her muzzle on his shoulder.  She had grown to know what the Voice meant.  Day and night she feared it, more than she feared the scent or sound of man.

Since she had given up the pack and her old life for Kazan, the Voice had become Gray Wolf’s greatest enemy, and she hated it.  It took Kazan from her.  And wherever it went, Kazan followed.

Night after night it robbed her of her mate, and left her to wander alone under the stars and the moon, keeping faithfully to her loneliness, and never once responding with her own tongue to the hunt-calls of her wild brothers and sisters in the forests and out on the plains.  Usually she would snarl at the Voice, and sometimes nip Kazan lightly to show her displeasure.  But to-day, as the Voice came a third time, she slunk back into the darkness of a fissure between two rocks, and Kazan saw only the fiery glow of her eyes.

Kazan ran nervously to the trail their feet had worn up to the top of the Sun Rock, and stood undecided.  All day, and yesterday, he had been uneasy and disturbed.  Whatever it was that stirred him seemed to be in the air, for he could not see it or hear it or scent it.  But he could feel it.  He went to the fissure and sniffed at Gray Wolf.  Usually she whined coaxingly.  But her response to-day was to draw back her lips until he could see her white fangs.

A fourth tune the Voice came to them faintly, and she snapped fiercely at some unseen thing in the darkness between the two rocks.  Kazan went again to the trail, still hesitating.  Then he began to go down.  It was a narrow winding trail, worn only by the pads and claws of animals, for the Sun Rock was a huge crag that rose almost sheer up for a hundred feet above the tops of the spruce and balsam, its bald crest catching the first gleams of the sun in the morning and the last glow of it in the evening.  Gray Wolf had first led Kazan to the security of the retreat at the top of the rock.