Next morning a queer thing happened, but not uncommon under the circumstances among wolves and huskies.  The cub was lying motionless, his head on his paws, his eyes wide open, when something stirred near him.  A red squirrel came scampering through the scrub branches just under the thick coating of snow that filled all their tops.  Slowly, carefully the young wolf gathered his feet under him, tense as a bowstring.  As the squirrel whisked overhead the wolf leaped like a flash, caught him, and crushed him with a single grip.  Then with the squirrel in his mouth he made his way back to where the big leader was lying, his head on his paws, his eyes turned aside.  Slowly, warily the cub approached, with a friendly twist of his ears and head, till he laid the squirrel at the big wolf’s very nose, then drew back a step and lay with paws extended and tail thumping the leaves, watching till the tidbit was seized ravenously and crushed and bolted in a single mouthful.  Next instant both wolves sprang to their feet and made their way out of the scrub together.

They took up the trail of the pack where they had left it, and followed it ten hours, the cub at a swift trot, the old wolf loping along on three legs.  Then a rest, and forward again, slower and slower, night after day in ever-failing strength, till on the edge of a great barren they stopped as if struck, trembling all over as the reek of game poured into their starving nostrils.

Too weak now to kill or to follow the fleet caribou, they lay down in the snow waiting, their ears cocked, their noses questioning every breeze for its good news.  Left to themselves the trail must end here, for they could go no farther; but somewhere ahead in the vast silent barren the cubs were trailing, and somewhere beyond them the old mother wolf was laying her ambush.—­Hark! from a spur of the valley, far below on their left, rang out the food cry, singing its way in the frosty air over woods and plains, and hurrying back over the trail to tell those who had fallen by the way that they were not forgotten.  And when they leaped up, as at an electric shock, and raced for the cry, there were the cubs and the mother wolf, their hunger already satisfied, and there in the snow a young bull caribou to save them.

So the long, hard winter passed away, and spring came again with its abundance.  Grouse drummed a welcome in the woods; the honk of wild geese filled the air with a joyous clangor, and in every open pool the ducks were quacking.  No need now to cling like shadows to the herds of caribou, and no further need for the pack to hold together.  The ties that held them melted like snows in the sunny hollows.  First the old wolves, then the cubs, one by one drifted away whither the game or their new mates were calling them.  When the summer came there was another den on the high hill overlooking the harbor, where the little brown cubs could look down with wonder at the shining sea and the slow fishing-boats and the children playing on the shore; but the wolves whose trail began there were far away over the mountains, following their own ways, waiting for the crisp hunting cry that should bring them again together.