They slipped back among the shadows of the spruce and watched Wolf in unbroken silence.  The animal now stood rigidly over the blood clot.  His head was level with his quivering back, his ears half aslant, his nostrils pointing to a strange thrilling scent that came to him from somewhere out there in the moonlight.  Once more the instinct of his breed was flooding the soul of the captive wolf.  There was the odor of blood in his widening nostrils.  It was not the blood of the camp, of the slaughtered game dragged in by human hands before his eyes.  It was the blood of the chase!

A flashing memory of his captors turned the animal’s head for an instant in backward inspection.  They were gone.  He could neither hear nor see them.  He sniffed the sign of human presence, but that sign was always with him, and was not disturbing.  The blood held him—­and the strange scent, the game scent—­that was coming to him more clearly every instant.

He crunched about cautiously in the snow.  He found other spots of blood, and to the watchers there came a low long whine that seemed about to end in the wolf song.  The blood trails were leading him away toward the game scent, and he tugged viciously at the babeesh that held him captive, gnawing at it vainly, like an angry dog, forgetting what experience had taught him many times before.  Each moment added to his excitement He ran about the sapling, gulped mouthfuls of the bloody snow, and each time he paused for a moment with his open dripping jaws held toward the dead buck on the rock.  The game was very near.  Brute sense told him that.  Oh, the longing that was in him, the twitching, quivering longing to kill—­kill—­kill!

He made another effort, tore up the snow in his frantic endeavors to free himself, to break loose, to follow in the wild glad cry of freed savagery in the calling of his people.  He failed again, panting, whining in piteous helplessness.

Then he settled upon his haunches at the end of his babeesh thong.

For a moment his head turned to the moonlit sky, his long nose poised at right angles to the bristling hollows between his shoulders.

There came then a low, whining wail, like the beginning of the “death-song” of a husky dog—­a wail that grew in length and in strength and in volume until it rose weirdly among the mountains and swept far out over the plains—­the hunt call of the wolf on the trail, which calls to him the famished, gray-gaunt outlaws of the wilderness, as the bugler’s notes call his fellows on the field of battle.

Three times that blood-thrilling cry went up from the captive wolf’s throat, and before those cries had died away the three hunters were perched upon their platforms among the spruce.