Baree had not forgotten Nepeese.  A dozen times he turned his head back and whined, and always he picked out accurately the direction in which the cabin lay.  But he did not turn back.  As the night lengthened, his search for that mysterious something which he had not found continued.  His hunger, even with the fading-out of the moon and the coming of the gray dawn, was not sufficiently keen to make him hunt for food.

It was cold, and it seemed colder when the glow of the moon and stars died out.  Under his padded feet, especially in the open spaces, was a thick white frost in which he left clearly at times the imprint of his toes and claws.  He had traveled steadily for hours, a great many miles in all, and he was tired when the first light of the day came.  And then there came the time when, with a sudden sharp click of his jaws, he stopped like a shot in his tracks.

At last it had come—­the meeting with that for which he had been seeking.  It was in a clearing, lighted by the cold dawn—­a tiny amphitheater that lay on the side of a ridge, facing the east.  With her head toward him, and waiting for him as he came out of the shadows, his scent strong in her keen nose, stood Maheegun, the young wolf.  Baree had not smelled her, but he saw her directly he came out of the rim of young balsams that fringed the clearing.  It was then that he stopped, and for a full minute neither of them moved a muscle or seemed to breathe.

There was not a fortnight’s difference in their age and yet Maheegun was much the smaller of the two.  Her body was as long, but she was slimmer; she stood on slender legs that were almost like the legs of a fox, and the curve of her back was that of a slightly bent bow, a sign of swiftness almost equal to the wind.  She stood poised for flight even as Baree advanced his first step toward her, and then very slowly her body relaxed, and in a direct ratio as he drew nearer her ears lost their alertness and dropped aslant.

Baree whined.  His own ears were up, his head alert, his tail aloft and bushy.  Cleverness, if not strategy, had already become a part of his masculine superiority, and he did not immediately press the affair.  He was within five feet of Maheegun when he casually turned away from her and faced the east, where a faint penciling of red and gold was heralding the day.  For a few moments he sniffed and looked around and pointed the wind with much seriousness, as though impressing on his fair acquaintance—­as many a two-legged animal has done before him—­his tremendous importance in the world at large.

And Maheegun was properly impressed.  Baree’s bluff worked as beautifully as the bluffs of the two-legged animals.  He sniffed the air with such thrilling and suspicious zeal that Maheegun’s ears sprang alert, and she sniffed it with him.  He turned his head from point to point so sharply and alertly that her feminine curiosity, if not anxiety, made her turn her own head in questioning conjunction.  And when he whined, as though in the air he had caught a mystery which she could not possibly understand, a responsive note gathered in her throat, but smothered and low as a woman’s exclamation when she is not quite sure whether she should interrupt her lord or not.  At this sound, which Baree’s sharp ears caught, he swung up to her with a light and mincing step, and in another moment they were smelling noses.