At times, when the cubs were hungry after a two-days fast, they would hear, faint and far away, the food cry, yap-yap-yooo! yap-yap-yoooooo! quivering under the stars in the tense early-morning air, and would dart away to find game freshly killed by one of the old wolves awaiting them.  Again, at nightfall, a cub’s hunting cry, ooooo, ow-ow! ooooo, ow-ow! a deep, almost musical hoot with two short barks at the end, would come singing down from the uplands; and the wolves, leaving instantly the game they were following, would hasten up to find the two cubs herding a caribou in a cleft of the rocks,—­a young caribou that had lost his mother at the hands of the hunters, and that did not know how to take care of himself.  And one of the cubs would hold him there, sitting on his tail in front of the caribou to prevent his escape, while the other cub called the wolves away from their own hunting to come and join the feast.

Whether this were a conscious attempt to spare the game, or to alarm it as little as need be, it is impossible to say.  Certainly the wolves know, better apparently than men, that persistent hunting destroys its own object, and that caribou especially, when much alarmed by dogs or wolves or men, will take the alarm quickly, and the scattered herds, moved by a common impulse of danger, will trail far away to other ranges.  That is why the wolf, unlike the less intelligent dog, hunts always in a silent, stealthy, unobtrusive way; and why he stops hunting and goes away the instant his own hunger is satisfied or another wolf kills enough for all.  And that is also the probable reason why he lets the deer alone as long as he can find any other game.

This same intelligent provision was shown in another curious way.  When a wolf in his wide ranging found a good hunting-ground where small game was plentiful, he would snap up a rabbit silently in the twilight and then go far away, perhaps to join the other cubs in a gambol, or to follow them to the cliffs over a fishing village and set all the dogs to howling.  By day he would lie close in some thick cover, miles away from his hunting-ground.  At twilight he would steal back and hunt quietly, just long enough to get his game, and then trot away again, leaving the cover as unharried as if there were not a wolf in the whole neighborhood.

Such a good hunting-ground cannot long remain hidden from other prowlers in the wilderness; and Wayeeses, who was keeping his discovery to himself, would soon cross the trail of a certain old fox returning day after day to the same good covers.  No two foxes, nor mice, nor men, nor any other two animals for that matter, ever leave the same scent,—­any old hound, which will hold steadily to one fox though a dozen others cross or cover his trail, will show you that plainly in a day’s hunting,—­and the wolf would soon know surely that the same fox was poaching every night on his own preserves while he was away.  To a casual, wandering hunter he paid