Still slowly, as if not quite sure of what he would find, Kazan came to them, and Baree snuggled closer to his mother.  He heard Kazan as he dropped down heavily on his belly close to Gray Wolf.  He was unafraid—­and mightily curious.  And Kazan, too, was curious.  He sniffed.  In the gloom his ears were alert.  After a little Baree began to move.  An inch at a time he dragged himself away from Gray Wolf’s side.  Every muscle in her lithe body tensed.  Again her wolf blood was warning her.  There was danger for Baree.  Her lips drew back, baring her fangs.  Her throat trembled, but the note in it never came.  Out of the darkness two yards away came a soft, puppyish whine, and the caressing sound of Kazan’s tongue.

Baree had felt the thrill of his first great adventure.  He had discovered his father.

This all happened in the third week of Baree’s life.  He was just eighteen days old when Gray Wolf allowed Kazan to make the acquaintance of his son.  If it had not been for Gray Wolf’s blindness and the memory of that day on the Sun Rock when the lynx had destroyed her eyes, she would have given birth to Baree in the open, and his legs would have been quite strong.  He would have known the sun and the moon and the stars; he would have realized what the thunder meant, and would have seen the lightning flashing in the sky.  But as it was, there had been nothing for him to do in that black cavern under the windfall but stumble about a little in the darkness, and lick with his tiny red tongue the raw bones that were strewn about them.  Many times he had been left alone.  He had heard his mother come and go, and nearly always it had been in response to a yelp from Kazan that came to them like a distant echo.  He had never felt a very strong desire to follow until this day when Kazan’s big, cool tongue caressed his face.  In those wonderful seconds nature was at work.  His instinct was not quite born until then.  And when Kazan went away, leaving them alone in darkness, Baree whimpered for him to come back, just as he had cried for his mother when now and then she had left him in response to her mate’s call.

The sun was straight above the forest when, an hour or two after Kazan’s visit, Gray Wolf slipped away.  Between Baree’s nest and the top of the windfall were forty feet of jammed and broken timber through which not a ray of light could break.  This blackness did not frighten him, for he had yet to learn the meaning of light.  Day, and not night, was to fill him with his first great terror.  So quite fearlessly, with a yelp for his mother to wait for him, he began to follow.  If Gray Wolf heard him, she paid no attention to his call, and the sound of the scraping of her claws on the dead timber died swiftly away.

This time Baree did not stop at the eight-inch log which had always shut in his world in that particular direction.  He clambered to the top of it and rolled over on the other side.  Beyond this was vast adventure, and he plunged into it courageously.