But Tusoo had been the last of his worn-out family; he had died of smallpox, and his wife and his children had died with him.  Since then no human foot had taken up his trails.  The lynx had multiplied.  The moose and caribou had gone unhunted by man.  The beaver had built their homes—­undisturbed.  The tracks of the black bear were as thick as the tracks of the deer farther south.  And where once the deadfalls and poison baits of Tusoo had kept the wolves thinned down, there was no longer a menace for these mohekuns of the wilderness.

Following the sun of this first wonderful day came the moon and the stars of Baree’s first real night.  It was a splendid night, and with it a full red moon sailed up over the forests, flooding the earth with a new kind of light, softer and more beautiful to Baree.  The wolf was strong in him, and he was restless.  He had slept that day in the warmth of the sun, but he could not sleep in this glow of the moon.  He nosed uneasily about Gray Wolf, who lay flat on her belly, her beautiful head alert, listening yearningly to the night sounds, and for the tonguing of Kazan, who had slunk away like a shadow to hunt.

Half a dozen times, as Baree wandered about near the windfall, he heard a soft whir over his head, and once or twice he saw gray shadows floating swiftly through the air.  They were the big northern owls swooping down to investigate him, and if he had been a rabbit instead of a wolf dog whelp, his first night under the moon and stars would have been his last; for unlike Wapoos, the rabbit, he was not cautious.  Gray Wolf did not watch him closely.  Instinct told her that in these forests there was no great danger for Baree except at the hands of man.  In his veins ran the blood of the wolf.  He was a hunter of all other wild creatures, but no other creature, either winged or fanged, hunted him.

In a way Baree sensed this.  He was not afraid of the owls.  He was not afraid of the strange bloodcurdling cries they made in the black spruce tops.  But once fear entered into him, and he scurried back to his mother.  It was when one of the winged hunters of the air swooped down on a snowshoe rabbit, and the squealing agony of the doomed creature set his heart thumping like a little hammer.  He felt in those cries the nearness of that one ever-present tragedy of the wild—­death.  He felt it again that night when, snuggled close to Gray Wolf, he listened to the fierce outcry of a wolf pack that was close on the heels of a young caribou bull.  And the meaning of it all, and the wild thrill of it all, came home to him early in the gray dawn when Kazan returned, holding between his jaws a huge rabbit that was still kicking and squirming with life.