There was silence, and in that awesome stillness Kazan and Gray Wolf stood shoulder to shoulder facing the cry, and in response to that cry there worked within them a strange and mystic change, for what they had heard was not a warning or a menace but the call of Brotherhood.  Away off there—­beyond the lynx and the fox and the fisher-cat, were the creatures of their kind, the wild-wolf pack, to which the right to all flesh and blood was common—­in which existed that savage socialism of the wilderness, the Brotherhood of the Wolf.  And Gray Wolf, setting back on her haunches, sent forth the response to that cry—­a wailing triumphant note that told her hungry brethren there was feasting at the end of the trail.

And the lynx, between those two cries, sneaked off into the wide and moonlit spaces of the forest.

CHAPTER XV

A FIGHT UNDER THE STARS

On their haunches Kazan and Gray Wolf waited.  Five minutes passed, ten—­fifteen—­and Gray Wolf became uneasy.  No response had followed her call.  Again she howled, with Kazan quivering and listening beside her, and again there followed that dead stillness of the night.  This was not the way of the pack.  She knew that it had not gone beyond the reach of her voice and its silence puzzled her.  And then in a flash it came to them both that the pack, or the single wolf whose cry they had heard, was very near them.  The scent was warm.  A few moments later Kazan saw a moving object in the moonlight.  It was followed by another, and still another, until there were five slouching in a half-circle about them, seventy yards away.  Then they laid themselves flat in the snow and were motionless.

A snarl turned Kazan’s eyes to Gray Wolf.  His blind mate had drawn back.  Her white fangs gleamed menacingly in the starlight.  Her ears were flat.  Kazan was puzzled.  Why was she signaling danger to him when it was the wolf, and not the lynx, out there in the snow?  And why did the wolves not come in and feast?  Slowly he moved toward them, and Gray Wolf called to him with her whine.  He paid no attention to her, but went on, stepping lightly, his head high in the air, his spine bristling.

In the scent of the strangers, Kazan was catching something now that was strangely familiar.  It drew him toward them more swiftly and when at last he stopped twenty yards from where the little group lay flattened in the snow, his thick brush waved slightly.  One of the animals sprang up and approached.  The others followed and in another moment Kazan was in the midst of them, smelling and smelled, and wagging his tail.  They were dogs, and not wolves.

In some lonely cabin in the wilderness their master had died, and they had taken to the forests.  They still bore signs of the sledge-traces.  About their necks were moose-hide collars.  The hair was worn short at their flanks, and one still dragged after him three feet of corded babiche trace.  Their eyes gleamed red and hungry in the glow of the moon and the stars.  They were thin, and gaunt and starved, and Kazan suddenly turned and trotted ahead of them to the side of the dead bull.  Then he fell back and sat proudly on his haunches beside Gray Wolf, listening to the snapping of jaws and the rending of flesh as the starved pack feasted.