One day he found a little baby moccasin under one of the closed windows.  It was old, and worn out, and blackened by snow and rain, but he lay down beside it, and remained there for a long time, while the baby Joan—­a thousand miles away—­was playing with the strange toys of civilization.  Then he returned to Gray Wolf among the spruce and balsam.

The cabin was the one place to which Gray Wolf would not follow him.  At all other times she was at his side.  Now that she had become accustomed to blindness, she even accompanied him on his hunts, until he struck game, and began the chase.  Then she would wait for him.  Kazan usually hunted the big snow-shoe rabbits.  But one night he ran down and killed a young doe.  The kill was too heavy to drag to Gray Wolf, so he returned to where she was waiting for him and guided her to the feast.  In many ways they became more and more inseparable as the summer lengthened, until at last, through all the wilderness, their footprints were always two by two and never one by one.

Then came the great fire.

Gray Wolf caught the scent of it when it was still two days to the west.  The sun that night went down in a lurid cloud.  The moon, drifting into the west, became blood red.  When it dropped behind the wilderness in this manner, the Indians called it the Bleeding Moon, and the air was filled with omens.

All the next day Gray Wolf was nervous, and toward noon Kazan caught in the air the warning that she had sensed many hours ahead of him.  Steadily the scent grew stronger, and by the middle of the afternoon the sun was veiled by a film of smoke.

The flight of the wild things from the triangle of forest between the junctions of the Pipestone and Cree Rivers would have begun then, but the wind shifted.  It was a fatal shift.  The fire was raging from the west and south.  Then the wind swept straight eastward, carrying the smoke with it, and during this breathing spell all the wild creatures in the triangle between the two rivers waited.  This gave the fire time to sweep completely, across the base of the forest triangle, cutting off the last trails of escape.

Then the wind shifted again, and the fire swept north.  The head of the triangle became a death-trap.  All through the night the southern sky was filled with a lurid glow, and by morning the heat and smoke and ash were suffocating.

Panic-striken, Kazan searched vainly for a means of escape.  Not for an instant did he leave Gray Wolf.  It would have been easy for him to swim across either of the two streams, for he was three-quarters dog.  But at the first touch of water on her paws, Gray Wolf drew back, shrinking.  Like all her breed, she would face fire and death before water.  Kazan urged.  A dozen times he leaped in, and swam out into the stream.  But Gray Wolf would come no farther than she could wade.

They could hear the distant murmuring roar of the fire now.  Ahead of it came the wild things.  Moose, caribou and deer plunged into the water of the streams and swam to the safety of the opposite side.  Out upon a white finger of sand lumbered a big black bear with two cubs, and even the cubs took to the water, and swam across easily.  Kazan watched them, and whined to Gray Wolf.