dog within hearing stark crazy.  Out of the village lanes far below they rushed headlong, and sitting on the beach in a wide circle, heads all in and tails out, they raised their noses to the distant, wolf-topped pinnacles and joined in the wailing answer.  Then the wolves would sit very still, listening with cocked ears to the cry of their captive kinsmen, till the dismal howling died away into silence, when they would start the clamor into life again by giving the wolf’s challenge.

Why they did it, what they felt there in the strange unreality of the moonlight, and what hushed their profound enmity, none can tell.  Ordinarily the wolf hates both fox and dog, and kills them whenever they cross his path; but to-night the foxes were yapping an answer all around them, and sometimes a few adventurous dogs would scale the mountains silently to sit on the rocks and join in the wild wolf chorus, and not a wolf stirred to molest them.  All were more or less lunatic, and knew not what they were doing.

For hours the uncanny comedy would drag itself on into the tense midnight silence, the wailing cry growing more demented and heartrending as the spell of ancient days fell again upon the degenerate huskies.  Up on the lonely mountain tops the moon looked down, still and cold, and saw upon every pinnacle a dog or a wolf, each with his head turned up at the sky, howling his heart out.  Down in the hamlet, scattered for miles along Deep Arm and the harbor shore, sleepers stirred uneasily at the clamor, the women clutching their babies close, the men cursing the crazy brutes and vowing all sorts of vengeance on the morrow.  Then the wolves would slip away like shadows into the vast upland barrens, and the dogs, restless as witches with some unknown excitement, would run back to whine and scratch at the doors of their masters’ cabins.

Soon the big snowflakes were whirling in the air, busily weaving a soft white winding-sheet for the autumn which was passing away.  And truly it had been a good time for the wolf cubs, as for most wild animals; and they had grown large and strong with their fat feeding, and wise with their many experiences.  The ducks and geese vanished, driving southward ahead of the fierce autumn gales, and only the late broods of hardy eiders were left for a little season.  Herring and caplin had long since drifted away into unknown depths, where the tides flowed endlessly over them and brought never a one ashore.  Hares and ptarmigans turned white to hide on the snow, so that wolf and fox would pass close by without seeing them.  Wood-mice pushed their winding tunnels and made their vaulted play rooms deep under the drifts, where none might molest nor make them afraid; and all game grew wary and wild, learning from experience, as it always does, that only the keen can survive the fall hunting.  So the long winter, with its snow and ice and its bitter cold and its grim threat of famine, settled heavily over Harbor Weal and the Long Range where Wayeeses must find his living.