of one of these sledges on the Gray Beaver, and followed it for half a mile.  The next day, farther to the west, they struck another, and on the fourth day still a third.  The last trail was fresh, and Gray Wolf drew back from it as if stung, her fangs snarling.  On the wind there came to them the pungent odor of smoke.  They cut at right angles to the trail, Gray Wolf leaping clear of the marks in the snow, and climbed to the cap of a ridge.  To windward of them, and down in the plain, a cabin was burning.  A team of huskies and a man were disappearing in the spruce forest.  Deep down in his throat Kazan gave a rumbling whine.  Gray Wolf stood as rigid as a rock.  In the cabin a plague-dead man was burning.  It was the law of the North.  And the mystery of the funeral pyre came again to Kazan and Gray Wolf.  This time they did not howl, but slunk down into the farther plain, and did not stop that day until they had buried themselves deep in a dry and sheltered swamp ten miles to the north.

After this they followed the days and weeks which marked the winter of nineteen hundred and ten as one of the most terrible in all the history of the Northland—­a single month in which wild life as well as human hung in the balance, and when cold, starvation and plague wrote a chapter in the lives of the forest people which will not be forgotten for generations to come.

In the swamp Kazan and Gray Wolf found a home under a windfall.  It was a small comfortable nest, shut in entirely from the snow and wind.  Gray Wolf took possession of it immediately.  She flattened herself out on her belly, and panted to show Kazan her contentment and satisfaction.  Nature again kept Kazan close at her side.  A vision came to him, unreal and dream-like, of that wonderful night under the stars—­ages and ages ago, it seemed—­when he had fought the leader of the wolf-pack, and young Gray Wolf had crept to his side after his victory and had given herself to him for mate.  But this mating season there was no running after the doe or the caribou, or mingling with the wild pack.  They lived chiefly on rabbit and spruce partridge, because of Gray Wolf’s blindness.  Kazan could hunt those alone.  The hair had now grown over Gray Wolf’s sightless eyes.  She had ceased to grieve, to rub her eyes with her paws, to whine for the sunlight, the golden moon and the stars.  Slowly she began to forget that she had ever seen those things.  She could now run more swiftly at Kazan’s flank.  Scent and hearing had become wonderfully keen.  She could wind a caribou two miles distant, and the presence of man she could pick up at an even greater distance.  On a still night she had heard the splash of a trout half a mile away.  And as these two things—­scent and hearing—­became more and more developed in her, those same senses became less active in Kazan.