Baree was on his feet, rigid as hewn rock, when Carvel came out of the tent, and for a few moments Carvel stood in silence, watching him closely.  Would the dog respond to the call of the pack?  Did he belong to them?  Would he go—­now?  The wolves were drawing nearer.  They were not circling, as a caribou or a deer would have circled, but were traveling straight—­dead straight for their camp.  The significance of this fact was easily understood by Carvel.  All that afternoon Baree’s feet had left a blood smell in their trail, and the wolves had struck the trail in the deep forest, where the falling snow had not covered it.  Carvel was not alarmed.  More than once in his five years of wandering between the Arctic and the Height of Land he had played the game with the wolves.  Once he had almost lost, but that was out in the open Barren.  Tonight he had a fire, and in the event of his firewood running out he had trees he could climb.  His anxiety just now was centered in Baree.  So he said, making his voice quite casual: 

“You aren’t going, are you, old chap?”

If Baree heard him he gave no evidence of it.  But Carvel, still watching him closely, saw that the hair along his spine had risen like a brush, and then he heard—­growing slowly in Baree’s throat—­a snarl of ferocious hatred.  It was the sort of snarl that had held back the factor from Lac Bain, and Carvel, opening the breech of his gun to see that all was right, chuckled happily.  Baree may have heard the chuckle.  Perhaps it meant something to him, for he turned his head suddenly and with flattened ears looked at his companion.

The wolves were silent now.  Carvel knew what that meant, and he was tensely alert.  In the stillness the click of the safety on his rifle sounded with metallic sharpness.  For many minutes they heard nothing but the crack of the fire.  Suddenly Baree’s muscles seemed to snap.  He sprang back, and faced the quarter behind Carvel, his head level with his shoulders, his inch-long fangs gleaming as he snarled into the black caverns of the forest beyond the rim of firelight.  Carvel had turned like a shot.  It was almost frightening—­what he saw.  A pair of eyes burning with greenish fire, and then another pair, and after that so many of them that he could not have counted them.  He gave a sadden gasp.  They were like cat eyes, only much larger.  Some of them, catching the firelight fully, were red as coals, others flashed blue and green—­living things without bodies.  With a swift glance he took in the black circle of the forest.  They were out there, too; they were on all sides of them, but where he had seen them first they were thickest.  In these first few seconds he had forgotten Baree, awed almost to stupefaction by that monster-eyed cordon of death that hemmed them in.  There were fifty—­perhaps a hundred wolves out there, afraid of nothing in all this savage world but fire.  They had come up without the sound of a padded foot or a broken twig.  If it had been later, and they had been asleep, and the fire out—­