Ben sensed another side of the forest to-night because of his inborn love of the waste places not often seen.  The thickets were menacing, sinister to-night.  The spruce crept up to the skyline with darkness and mystery:  he realized the eternal malevolence that haunts their silent fastnesses.  They would have tricks in plenty to play on such as would lose their way on their dusky trails!  Oh, they would have no mercy or remorse for any one who was lost, out there, to-night!  Ben felt a heavy burden of dread!

Even now, old Ezram might be wandering, vainly, through the gloomy, whispering woods, ever penetrating farther into their merciless solitudes.  And no homes smoked in the clearings, no camps glowed in the immensity of the dark—­out there.  This was just the beginning of the forest; clear into the shadow of the Arctic Circle, where the woodlands gave way to the Weary wastes of barrens, there was no break, no tilled fields or fisher’s villages, only an occasional Indian encampment which not even a wolf, running through the night, might find.  His supply of food would quickly be exhausted, fatigue would break his valiant spirit.  Ben planned an extensive search for his tracks as soon as the morning light permitted him to see.

He missed the old man’s comradeship with a deep and fervid longing.  They had come to count on each other, these past weeks.  It wasn’t alone infinite gratitude that he felt for him now.  The thing went too deep to tell.  Yet there was no use seeking for him to-night.

He turned to the wolf and dropped his hand upon the animal’s shoulder.  Fenris started, then quivered in ecstasy.  “I wish I had your nose, to-night, old boy,” Ben told him.  “I’d find that old buddy of mine.  I wish I had your eyes to see in the dark, and your legs to run.  Fenris, do you know where he is?”

The wolf turned his wild eyes toward his master’s face, as if he were trying to understand.

XIV

Impelled by an urge within himself Ben suddenly knelt beside his lupine friend.  He could not understand the flood of emotion, the vague sense of impending and dramatic events that stirred him to the quick.  He only knew, with a knowledge akin to inspiration, that in Fenris lay the answer to his problem.

The moment was misted over with a quality of unreality.  In the east rose the moon, shining incredibly on the tree tops, showering down through the little rifts in the withholding branches, enchanting the place as by the weaving of a dream.  The moon madness caught up Ben like a flame, enthralling him as never before.  He knew that white sphere of old.  And all at once he realized that here, at his knees, was one who knew it too,—­with a knowledge as ancient and as infinite as his own.  Not for nothing had the wolf breed lived their lives beneath it through the long roll of the ages.  Its rising and its setting had regulated the hunting hours of the pack