Ray and Chan, standing beside their prisoner in their grisly camp on the opposite shore, might have beheld Ben’s approach if weightier matters had not occupied their minds.  They had only to walk to the edge of the firelight and stare down through a rift in the trees to see him.  But they stood with the angry glare revealing a strange and sinister intentness in their drawn faces and ominous speculations in their evil eyes.

XLI

It was a wilderness moon that rose over the spruce to-night,—­white as new silver, incredibly large, inscrutably mysterious.  The winds had whisked away the last pale cloud that might have dimmed its glory, and its light poured down with equal bounty on peak and hill, forest and yellow marsh.  The heavy woods partook most deeply of its enchantment:  tall, stately trees pale and nebulous as if with silver frost, each little stream dancing and shimmering in its light, every glade laid with a fairy tapestry, every shadow dreadful and black in contrast.  The wilderness breathed and shivered as if swept with passion.

The wilderness moon is the moon of desire; and all this great space of silence seemed to respond.  It seemed to throb, like one living entity, as if in longing for something lost long ago—­a half-forgotten happiness, a glory and a triumph that were gone never to return.  No creatures that followed the woods trails were dull and flat to-night.  They were all swept with mystery, knowing vague longings or fierce desires.  It was the harvest moon; but here it did not light the fields so that men might harvest grain.  Rather it illumined the hunting trails so that the beasts of prey might find relief from the wild lusts and seething ferment that was in their veins.  But mostly the forest mood was disconsolate, rather than savage, to-night.  The wild geese on the lake called their weird and plaintive cries, their strange complaints that no man understands; the loons laughed in insane despair; and the coyotes on the ridge wailed out the pain of living and the vague longings of their wild hearts.

In the glory of that moon Fenris the wolf knew the same, resistless longings that so many times before had turned him from the game trails.  There was something here that was unutterably dear to him,—­something that drew him, called him like a voice, and he could not turn aside.  Because he was a beast, he likely did not know the force that was drawing him again along the lake shore.  Yet the souls of the lower creatures no man knows; and perhaps he had conscious longings, profoundly intense, for a moment’s touch of a strong hand on his shoulder,—­one never-to-be-forgotten caress from a certain god that had gone to a cave to live.  It was true that his wild instincts, ever more in dominance these past weeks, would likely halt him at the cavern maw, permitting no intimacy other than to ascertain that all was well.  They were too strong ever to brook man’s control again.  The moon was a moon of desire, but only because it was also the moon of memory,—­and perhaps memories, stirring and exalting, were sweeping through him.  Straight as an arrow he turned toward the cave.