He was just in time, as he leapt lightly off the windfall, to avoid the rush of a vast brown bulk, reeking of carrion, furry, terrible, with live-coals for eyes, and threshing the air with claws Heaven knows how long, which hurled itself like an avalanche out of the hollow at him.  And that thing was a bear.

Now, bears do not, as a rule, without extraordinary reason, in that land, rouse themselves out of their winter sleep for the mere whine of a wolf.  They are impregnable where they are, and know it.  The extraordinary reason, however, was present.  The white wolf was sniffing at it now—­the bear’s blood-trail to the windfall.  Bruin had been roused once before that day—­by beaters.  He had then been driven forward, shot at by hunters, wounded, escaped, and returned to his den.  But—­but, I give you my word, if those beaters, those peasants, had known the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was out, nothing in the wide world would have induced them to beat for bears or anything else in that vicinity.

The white wolf stretched himself to a canter, and slid away through the forest, dropping the trees past him like telegraph-poles past a railway-carriage window.  He looked like the very spirit of winter, the demon of the snows, and stood for that in the ignorant minds of the sparsely scattered people—­perhaps because at a short distance he was nearly invisible.  His white coat, which was simply a conspicuous curse to him when there was no snow—­which was one reason, maybe, why he retired from the limelight to some lonely fastness during summer—­was an incalculable asset to him in winter, and he knew it.

He ran, with his smooth, loose, effortless lope, perhaps a quarter of a mile, then stopped, and putting up his head, howled a howl so full of hopeless, cruel yearning, so vibrant with desolation, that it sounded like the cry of a soul doomed forever to seek something it could never find.  It was a lugubrious yowl there, in that setting, and it made one’s scalp creep all over one’s cranium.

And instantly almost, even as the last, long, horrible echoes died, sobbing adown the blue-haze perspective of the forest glades, the answer came—­a far-away, fluttering, wandering howl, like the moan of the wind in its sleep.

The white wolf waited a moment, then howled again, and the ghastly sound came back to him, louder and nearer this time.

A third time he howled, and the forest cringed under the reply.

Then at last the shadows between the ranked tree-trunks took unto themselves life, and eyes, eyes in pairs, horribly hungry, cruel port-holes of brains, with a glary, stary, green light behind them, suddenly appeared everywhere, like swiftly-turned-on electric lamps.  There was a whispering rush, as if giants were swiftly dealing cards in the silence, and—­the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was away, racing like a cloud-shadow, rapid and impetuous as a greyhound, at the head of a pack of one hundred and twenty-nine empty-stomached wolves.