No man knew Bram for a friend.  He was a mystery.  He never remained at a post longer than was necessary to exchange his furs for supplies, and it might be months or even years before he returned to that particular post again.  He was ceaselessly wandering.  More or less the Royal Northwest Mounted Police kept track of him, and in many reports of faraway patrols filed at Headquarters there are the laconic words, “We saw Bram and his wolves traveling northward” or “Bram and his wolves passed us”—­always Bram and his wolves.  For two years the Police lost track of him.  That was when Bram was buried in the heart of the Sulphur Country east of the Great Bear.  After that the Police kept an even closer watch on him, waiting, and expecting something to happen.  And then—­the something came.  Bram killed a man.  He did it so neatly and so easily, breaking him as he might have broken a stick, that he was well off in flight before it was discovered that his victim was dead.  The next tragedy followed quickly—­a fortnight later, when Corporal Lee and a private from the Fort Churchill barracks closed in on him out on the edge of the Barren.  Bram didn’t fire a shot.  They could hear his great, strange laugh when they were still a quarter of a mile away from him.  Bram merely set loose his wolves.  By a miracle Corporal Lee lived to drag himself to a half-breed’s cabin, where he died a little later, and the half-breed brought the story to Fort Churchill.

After this, Bram disappeared from the eyes of the world.  What he lived in those four or five years that followed would well be worth his pardon if his experiences could be made to appear between the covers of a book.  Bram—­and his wolves!  Think of it.  Alone.  In all that time without a voice to talk to him.  Not once appearing at a post for food.  A loup-garou.  An animal-man.  A companion of wolves.  By the end of the third year there was not a drop of dog-blood in his pack.  It was wolf, all wolf.  From whelps he brought the wolves up, until he had twenty in his pack.  They were monsters, for the under-grown ones he killed.  Perhaps he would have given them freedom in place of death, but these wolf-beasts of Bram’s would not accept freedom.  In him they recognized instinctively the super-beast, and they were his slaves.  And Bram, monstrous and half animal himself, loved them.  To him they were brother, sister, wife—­all creation.  He slept with them, and ate with them, and starved with them when food was scarce.  They were comradeship and protection.  When Bram wanted meat, and there was meat in the country, he would set his wolf-horde on the trail of a caribou or a moose, and if they drove half a dozen miles ahead of Bram himself there would always be plenty of meat left on the bones when he arrived.  Four years of that!  The Police would not believe it.  They laughed at the occasional rumors that drifted in from the far places; rumors that Bram had been seen, and that