smell the presence of it.  He drew back, and saw Gray Wolf cautiously nosing about a long and peculiarly shaped hummock in the snow.  She had traveled about it three times, but never approaching nearer than a man could have reached with a rifle barrel.  At the end of her third circle she sat down on her haunches, and Kazan went close to the hummock and sniffed.  Under that bulge in the snow, as well as in the tepee, there was death.  They slunk away, their ears flattened and their tails drooping until they trailed the snow, and did not stop until they reached their swamp home.  Even there Gray Wolf still sniffed the horror of the plague, and her muscles twitched and shivered as she lay close at Kazan’s side.

That night the big white moon had around its edge a crimson rim.  It meant cold—­intense cold.  Always the plague came in the days of greatest cold—­the lower the temperature the more terrible its havoc.  It grew steadily colder that night, and the increased chill penetrated to the heart of the windfall, and drew Kazan and Gray Wolf closer together.  With dawn, which came at about eight o’clock, Kazan and his blind mate sallied forth into the day.  It was fifty degrees below zero.  About them the trees cracked with reports like pistol-shots.  In the thickest spruce the partridges were humped into round balls of feathers.  The snow-shoe rabbits had burrowed deep under the snow or to the heart of the heaviest windfalls.  Kazan and Gray Wolf found few fresh trails, and after an hour of fruitless hunting they returned to their lair.  Kazan, dog-like, had buried the half of a rabbit two or three days before, and they dug this out of the snow and ate the frozen flesh.

All that day it grew colder—­steadily colder.  The night that followed was cloudless, with a white moon and brilliant stars.  The temperature had fallen another ten degrees, and nothing was moving.  Traps were never sprung on such nights, for even the furred things—­the mink, and the ermine, and the lynx—­lay snug in the holes and the nests they had found for themselves.  An increasing hunger was not strong enough to drive Kazan and Gray Wolf from their windfall.  The next day there was no break in the terrible cold, and toward noon Kazan set out on a hunt for meat, leaving Gray Wolf in the windfall.  Being three-quarters dog, food was more necessary to Kazan than to his mate.  Nature has fitted the wolf-breed for famine, and in ordinary temperature Gray Wolf could have lived for a fortnight without food.  At sixty degrees below zero she could exist a week, perhaps ten days.  Only thirty hours had passed sinee they had devoured the last of the frozen rabbit, and she was quite satisfied to remain in their snug retreat.