It was her last call to Kazan.  But stronger than that there was running through Kazan’s excited blood the call of man and of dog.  The huskies were far in advance of him now and for a few moments he raced madly to overtake them.  Then he slowed down until he was trotting, and a hundred yards farther on he stopped.  Less than a mile away he could see where the flames of the great fires were reddening the sky.  He gazed back to see if Gray Wolf was following and then went on until he struck an open and hard traveled trail.  It was beaten with the footprints of men and dogs, and over it two of the caribou had been dragged a day or two before.

At last he came to the thinned out strip of timber that surrounded the clearing and the flare of the flames was in his eyes.  The bedlam of sound that came to him now was like fire in his brain.  He heard the song and the laughter of men, the shrill cries of women and children, the barking and snarling and fighting of a hundred dogs.  He wanted to rush out and join them, to become again a part of what he had once been.  Yard by yard he sneaked through the thin timber until he reached the edge of the clearing.  There he stood in the shadow of a spruce and looked out upon life as he had once lived it, trembling, wistful and yet hesitating in that final moment.

A hundred yards away was the savage circle of men and dogs and fire.  His nostrils were filled with the rich aroma of the roasting caribou, and as he crouched down, still with that wolfish caution that Gray Wolf had taught him, men with long poles brought the huge carcasses crashing down upon the melting snow about the fires.  In one great rush the horde of wild revelers crowded in with bared knives, and a snarling mass of dogs closed in behind them.  In another moment he had forgotten Gray Wolf, had forgotten all that man and the wild had taught him, and like a gray streak was across the open.

The dogs were surging back when he reached them, with half a dozen of the factor’s men lashing them in the faces with long caribou-gut whips.  The sting of a lash fell in a fierce cut over an Eskimo dog’s shoulder, and in snapping at the lash his fangs struck Kazan’s rump.  With lightning swiftness Kazan returned the cut, and in an instant the jaws of the dogs had met.  In another instant they were down and Kazan had the Eskimo dog by the throat.

With shouts the men rushed in.  Again and again their whips cut like knives through the air.  Their blows fell on Kazan, who was uppermost, and as he felt the burning pain of the scourging whips there flooded through him all at once the fierce memory of the days of old—­the days of the Club and the Lash.  He snarled.  Slowly he loosened his hold of the Eskimo dog’s throat.  And then, out of the melee of dogs and men, there sprang another man—­with a club!  It fell on Kazan’s back and the force of it sent him flat into the snow.  It was raised again.  Behind the club there was a face—­a brutal, fire-reddened face.  It was such a face that had driven Kazan into the wild, and as the club fell again he evaded the full weight of its blow and his fangs gleamed like ivory knives.  A third time the club was raised, and this time Kazan met it in mid-air, and his teeth ripped the length of the man’s forearm.