Each day the temperature continued to rise until when the sun was warmest the snow began to thaw a little.  This was two weeks after the fight near the bull.  Gradually the pack had swung eastward, until it was now fifty miles east and twenty miles south of the old home under the windfall.  More than ever Gray Wolf began to long for their old nest under the fallen trees.  Again with those first promises of spring in sunshine and air, there was coming also for the second time in her life the promise of approaching motherhood.

But her efforts to draw Kazan back were unavailing, and in spite of her protest he wandered each day a little farther east and south at the head of his pack.

Instinct impelled the four huskies to move in that direction.  They had not yet been long enough a part of the wild to forget the necessity of man and in that direction there was man.  In that direction, and not far from them now, was the Hudson Bay Company’s post to which they and their dead master owed their allegiance.  Kazan did not know this, but one day something happened to bring back visions and desires that widened still more the gulf between him and Gray Wolf.

They had come to the cap of a ridge when something stopped them.  It was a man’s voice crying shrilly that word of long ago that had so often stirred the blood in Kazan’s own veins—­“m’hoosh! m’hoosh! m’hoosh!"—­and from the ridge they looked down upon the open space of the plain, where a team of six dogs was trotting ahead of a sledge, with a man running behind them, urging them on at every other step with that cry of “m’hoosh! m’hoosh! m’hoosh!"

Trembling and undecided, the four huskies and the wolf-dog stood on the ridge with Gray Wolf cringing behind them.  Not until man and dogs and sledge had disappeared did they move, and then they trotted down to the trail and sniffed at it whiningly and excitedly.  For a mile or two they followed it, Kazan and his mates going fearlessly in the trail.  Gray Wolf hung back, traveling twenty yards to the right of them, with the hot man-scent driving the blood feverishly through her brain.  Only her love for Kazan—­and the faith she still had in him—­kept her that near.

At the edge of a swamp Kazan halted and turned away from the trail.  With the desire that was growing in him there was still that old suspicion which nothing could quite wipe out—­the suspicion that was an inheritance of his quarter-strain of wolf.  Gray Wolf whined joyfully when he turned into the forest, and drew so close to him that her shoulder rubbed against Kazan’s as they traveled side by side.

The “slush” snows followed fast after this.  And the “slush” snows meant spring—­and the emptying of the wilderness of human life.  Kazan and his mates soon began to scent the presence and the movement of this life.  They were now within thirty miles of the post.  For a hundred miles on all sides of them the trappers were moving in with their late winter’s catch of furs.  From east and west, south and north, all trails led to the post.  The pack was caught in the mesh of them.  For a week not a day passed that they did not cross a fresh trail, and sometimes two or three.