Baree did not travel far this night.  The fact that his wound had come with dusk, and his fight with Oohoomisew still later, filled him with caution.  Experience had taught him that the dark shadows and the black pits in the forest were possible ambuscades of danger.  He was no longer afraid, as he had once been, but he had had fighting enough for a time, and so he accepted circumspection as the better part of valor and held himself aloof from the perils of darkness.  It was a strange instinct that made him seek his bed on the top of a huge rock up which he had some difficulty in climbing.  Perhaps it was a harkening back to the days of long ago when Gray Wolf, in her first motherhood, sought refuge at the summit of the Sun Rock which towered high above the forest world of which she and Kazan were a part, and where later she was blinded in her battle with the lynx.

Baree’s rock, instead of rising for a hundred feet or more straight up, was possibly as high as a man’s head.  It was in the edge of the creek bottom, with the spruce forest close at his back.  For many hours he did not sleep, but lay keenly alert, his ears tuned to catch every sound that came out of the dark world about him.  There was more than curiosity in his alertness tonight.  His education had broadened immensely in one way:  he had learned that he was a very small part of all this wonderful earth that lay under the stars and the moon, and he was keenly alive with the desire to become better acquainted with it without any more fighting or hurt.  Tonight he knew what it meant when he saw now and then gray shadows float silently out of the forest into the moonlight—­the owls, monsters of the breed with which he had fought.  He heard the crackling of hoofed feet and the smashing of heavy bodies in the underbrush.  He heard again the mooing of the moose.  Voices came to him that he had not heard before—­the sharp yap-yap-yap of a fox, the unearthly, laughing cry of a great Northern loon on a lake half a mile away, the scream of a lynx that came floating through miles of forest, the low, soft croaks of the nighthawks between himself and the stars.  He heard strange whisperings in the treetops—­whisperings of the wind.  And once, in the heart of a dead stillness, a buck whistled shrilly close behind his rock—­and at the wolf scent in the air shot away in a terror-stricken gray streak.

All these sounds held their new meaning for Baree.  Swiftly he was coming into his knowledge of the wilderness.  His eyes gleamed; his blood thrilled.  Often for many minutes at a time he scarcely moved.  But of all the sounds that came to him, the wolf cry thrilled him most.  Again and again he listened to it.  At times it was far away, so far that it was like a whisper, dying away almost before it reached him.  Then again it would come to him full-throated, hot with the breath of the chase, calling him to the red thrill of the hunt, to the wild orgy of torn flesh and running blood—­calling, calling, calling.  That was it, calling him to his own kin, to the bone of his bone and the flesh of his flesh—­to the wild, fierce hunting packs of his mother’s tribe!  It was Gray Wolf’s voice seeking for him in the night—­Gray Wolf’s blood inviting him to the Brotherhood of the Pack.