time without end; its beams had lighted the game trails where the gray band had bayed after the deer; its light had beheld, since the world was young, the rapturous mating of the old pack leader and his female.  Fenris too knew the moon-madness; but unlike Ben he had a means of expression of the wonder and mystery and vague longing that thrilled his wild heart.  No man who has heard the pack song to the moon could doubt this fact.  It is a long, melancholy wail, poignant with the pain of living, but it tells what man can not.

Ben knew, now, why he was a forester, a woodsman famed even among woodsmen.  Most of his fellows had been tamed by civilization; they had lived beneath roofs instead of the canopy of heaven, and they had almost forgotten about the moon.  Ben, on the other hand, was a recurrence of an earlier type, inheriting little from his immediate ancestors but reverting back a thousand centuries to the Cave and the Squatting Place.  His nature was that of prehistoric man rather than that of the son of civilization; and in this lay the explanation for all that had set him apart from the great run of men and had made him the master woodsman that he was.  And because his spirit was of the wildwood, because he also knew the magic of the moon, he was able to make this wildwood thing at his feet understand and obey his will.

The world of to-day seemed to fade out for him and left only the wolf, its fierce eyes on his own.  Time swung back, and this might have been a scene of forgotten ages,—­the wolf, the human hunter, the smoldering camp fire, the dark, jagged line of spruce against the sky.  It was thus at the edge of the ice.  Wolf and man—­both children of the wild—­had understood each other then; and they could understand each other now.

“Fenris, old boy,” the man whispered.  “Can you find him for me, Fenris?  He’s out there somewhere—­” the man motioned toward the dark—­“and I want him.  Can you take me to him?”

The wolf trembled all over, struggling to get his meaning.  This was no creature of subordinate intelligence:  the great wolf of the North.  He had, besides the cunning of the wild hunters, the intelligence that is the trait of the whole canine breed.  Nor did he depend on his sense of hearing alone.  He watched his master’s face, and more than that, he was tuned and keyed to those mysterious vibrations that carry a message from brain to brain no less clearly and swift than words themselves,—­the secret wireless of the wild.

“He’s my buddy, old boy, and I want you to find him for me,” Ben went on, more patiently.  He searched his pockets, drawing out at last the copy of the letter Ezram had given him that morning, and, because the old man had carried it for many days, it could still convey a message to the keen nose of the wolf.  He put it to the animal’s nostrils, then pointed away into the darkness.

Fenris followed the motion with his eyes; and presently his long body stiffened.  Ben watched him, fascinated.  Then the wolf sniffed at the paper again and trotted away into the night.