For one brief moment the little hunter stood with upturned face, while Mooka bowed her head silently, and the great storm rolled unheeded over them.  Still holding his long bow he stretched both hands to the sky in the mute appeal that Keesuolukh, the Great Mystery whom we call God, would understand better than all words.  Then turning their backs to the gale they drifted swiftly away before it, like two wind-blown leaves, running to keep from freezing, and holding each other’s hands tight lest they separate and be lost by the way.

The second winter had come, sealing up the gloomy land till it rang like iron at the touch, then covering it deep with snow and polishing its mute white face with hoar-frost and hail driven onward by the fierce Arctic gales.  An appalling silence rested on plains and mountains.  Not a chirp, not a rustle broke the intense, unnatural stillness.  One might travel all day long without a sight or sound of life; and when the early twilight came and life stirred shyly from its coverts and snow caves, the Wood Folk stole out into the bare white world on noiseless, hesitating feet, as if in presence of the dead.

When the Moon of Famine came, the silence was rudely broken.  Before daylight one morning, when the air was so tense and still that a whisper set it tinkling like silver bells, the rallying cry of the wolves rolled down from a mountain top; and the three cubs, that had waited long for the signal, left their separate trails far away and hurried to join the old leader.

When the sun rose that morning one who stood on the high ridge of the Top Gallants, far to the eastward of Harbor Weal, would have seen seven trails winding down among the rocks and thickets.  It needed only a glance to show that the seven trails, each one as clear-cut and delicate as that of a prowling fox, were the records of wolves’ cautious feet; and that they were no longer beating the thickets for grouse and rabbits, but moving swiftly all together for the edges of the vast barrens where the caribou herds were feeding.  Another glance—­but here we must have the cunning eyes of Old Tomah the hunter—­would have told that two of the trails were those of enormous wolves which led the pack; two others were plainly cubs that had not yet lost the cub trick of frolicking in the soft snow; while three others were just wolves, big and powerful brutes that moved as if on steel springs, and that still held to the old pack because the time had not yet come for them to scatter finally to their separate ways and head new packs of their own in the great solitudes.