was broken.  From out of the owl-infested pits came a strange and hollow sound.  Miki had heard the shrill screeching and the Tu-who-O-O, Tu-who-O-O, Tu-who-O-O of the little owls, the trap-pirates, but never this voice of the strong-winged Jezebels and Frankensteins of the deeper forests—­the real butchers of the night.  It was a hollow, throaty sound—­more a moan than a cry; a moan so short and low that it seemed born of caution, or of fear that it would frighten possible prey.  For a few minutes pit after pit gave forth each its signal of life, and then there was a silence of voice, broken at intervals by the faint, crashing sweep of great wings in the spruce and balsam tops as the hunters launched themselves up and over them in the direction of the plain.

The going forth of the owls was only the beginning of the night carnival for Neewa and Miki.  For a long time they lay side by side, sleepless, and listening.  Past the windfall went the padded feet of a fisher-cat, and they caught the scent of it; to them came the far cry of a loon, the yapping of a restless fox, and the MOOING of a cow moose feeding in the edge of a lake on the farther side of the plain.  And then, at last, came the thing that made their blood run faster and sent a deeper thrill into their hearts.

It seemed a vast distance away at first—­the hot throated cry of wolves on the trail of meat.  It was swinging northward into the plain, and this shortly brought the cry with the wind, which was out of the north and the west.  The howling of the pack was very distinct after that, and in Miki’s brain nebulous visions and almost unintelligible memories were swiftly wakening into life.  It was not Challoner’s voice that he heard, but it was A voice that he knew.  It was the voice of Hela, his giant father; the voice of Numa, his mother; the voice of his kind for a hundred and a thousand generations before him, and it was the instinct of those generations and the hazy memory of his earliest puppyhood that were impinging the thing upon him.  A little later it would take both intelligence and experience to make him discriminate the hair-breadth difference between wolf and dog.  And this voice of his blood was coming!  It bore down upon them swiftly, fierce and filled with the blood-lust of hunger.  He forgot Neewa.  He did not observe the cub when he slunk back deeper under the windfall.  He rose up on his feet and stood stiff and tense, unconscious of all things but that thrilling tongue of the hunt-pack.

Wind-broken, his strength failing him, and his eyes wildly searching the night ahead for the gleam of water that might save him, Ahtik, the young caribou bull, raced for his life a hundred yards ahead of the wolves.  The pack had already flung itself out in the form of a horse-shoe, and the two ends were beginning to creep up abreast of Ahtik, ready to close in for the hamstring—­ and the kill.  In these last minutes every throat was silent, and the young bull sensed the beginning of the end.  Desperately he turned to the right and plunged into the forest.