“Such stories as those are false, Rod.  When I spent my year at school with you I read dozens of stories about wild animals, and very few of them were true.  All sorts of people write about the wilderness, and yet not one out of a hundred of those same people have ever been in the real wilderness.  And it is wonderful what some of them make wild animals do!”

Rod straightened himself with a jerk.

“I have been here only a few months, Wabi, and yet I have seen more wonderful things about animals than I have ever read in print,” he declared.

“Of course you have,” agreed his companion.  “And there is just the point I want to make clear.  Wild animals are the most wonderful creatures in existence, and if some of their actual habits and adventures were told they would be laughed at down where you came from.  Where your writers make their mistake is in bringing them into too close association with human beings, and making them half human.  Wolf remained with us because he knew no better.  We caught him when he was a whelp, and as he grew older both Mukoki and I could see that at times he was filled with a wild longing to join his people.  We knew that it was coming.  He will never return to us.”

Mukoki made a soft sound deep down in his throat, and Rod turned suddenly toward him.

“You believe that, Mukoki?”

“Wolf gone!”

“But animals think, don’t they?” persisted Rod, to whom the discussion was of absorbing interest.  “They reason, they remember!”

“They do all of that,” replied Wabi, “and more.  I have read certain so-called natural history stories which ridiculed the idea of wild animals possessing mental abilities, and which ascribed pretty nearly all their actions to instinct.  Such stories are as wrong as those which give wild animals human endowments.  Animals do think.  Don’t you suppose that mother moose was thinking when she stopped out there in the plain?  Wasn’t she turning the situation over in her mind, if you want to speak of it as that, and mentally figuring just where the danger lay, and in which direction she ought to take flight?  And besides reason wild animals have instinct.  One proof of this is their sixth sense; the sense of—­of—­what do you call it?”

“Orientation?” assisted Rod.

“Yes; that’s it.  Orientation.  A bear, for instance, doesn’t carry a compass with him, as some nature writers would like to have you believe, and yet he can go from this mountain to a den a hundred miles away as straight as a bird can fly.  That’s instinct.”

“Then Wolf—­” mused Rod slowly.

“Is with the hunt pack,” finished the young Indian.

Mukoki spoke softly, as though to himself.

“Last winter the snow came, and now it is water.  Two moons past, Wolf, heem tame.  Now wild.  The Great Spirit say that is right, I guess so.”

“He means that it is nature,” said Wabi.