Another time the brown wanderer succeeded in traversing half the length of California, all of Oregon, and most of Washington, before he was picked up and returned “Collect.”  A remarkable thing was the speed with which he traveled.  Fed up and rested, as soon as he was loosed he devoted all his energy to getting over the ground.  On the first day’s run he was known to cover as high as a hundred and fifty miles, and after that he would average a hundred miles a day until caught.  He always arrived back lean and hungry and savage, and always departed fresh and vigorous, cleaving his way northward in response to some prompting of his being that no one could understand.

But at last, after a futile year of flight, he accepted the inevitable and elected to remain at the cottage where first he had killed the rabbit and slept by the spring.  Even after that, a long time elapsed before the man and woman succeeded in patting him.  It was a great victory, for they alone were allowed to put hands on him.  He was fastidiously exclusive, and no guest at the cottage ever succeeded in making up to him.  A low growl greeted such approach; if any one had the hardihood to come nearer, the lips lifted, the naked fangs appeared, and the growl became a snarl—­a snarl so terrible and malignant that it awed the stoutest of them, as it likewise awed the farmers’ dogs that knew ordinary dog snarling, but had never seen wolf snarling before.

He was without antecedents.  His history began with Walt and Madge.  He had come up from the south, but never a clew did they get of the owner from whom he had evidently fled.  Mrs. Johnson, their nearest neighbor and the one who supplied them with milk, proclaimed him a Klondike dog.  Her brother was burrowing for frozen pay-streaks in that far country, and so she constituted herself an authority on the subject.

But they did not dispute her.  There were the tips of Wolf’s ears, obviously so severely frozen at some time that they would never quite heal again.  Besides, he looked like the photographs of the Alaskan dogs they saw published in magazines and newspapers.  They often speculated over his past, and tried to conjure up (from what they had read and heard) what his northland life had been.  That the northland still drew him, they knew; for at night they sometimes heard him crying softly; and when the north wind blew and the bite of frost was in the air, a great restlessness would come upon him and he would lift a mournful lament which they knew to be the long wolf-howl.  Yet he never barked.  No provocation was great enough to draw from him that canine cry.

Long discussion they had, during the time of winning him, as to whose dog he was.  Each claimed him, and each proclaimed loudly any expression of affection made by him.  But the man had the better of it at first, chiefly because he was a man.  It was patent that Wolf had had no experience with women.  He did not understand women.  Madge’s skirts were something he never quite accepted.  The swish of them was enough to set him a-bristle with suspicion, and on a windy day she could not approach him at all.