Never had they been able to see so far, except in the light of day.  Under them was a plain.  They could make out forests, lone trees that stood up like shadows out of the snow, a stream—­still unfrozen—­shimmering like glass with the flicker of firelight on it.  Toward this stream Baree led the way.  He no longer thought of Nepeese, and he whined with pent-up happiness as he stopped halfway down and turned to muzzle Maheegun.  He wanted to roll in the snow and frisk about with his companion; he wanted to bark, to put up his head and howl as he had howled at the Red Moon back at the cabin.

Something held him from doing any of these things.  Perhaps it was Maheegun’s demeanor.  She accepted his attentions rigidly.  Once or twice she had seemed almost frightened; twice Baree had heard the sharp clicking of her teeth.  The previous night, and all through tonight’s storm, their companionship had grown more intimate, but now there was taking its place a mysterious aloofness on the part of Maheegun.  Pierrot could have explained.  With moon and stars above him, Baree, like the night, had undergone a transformation which even the sunlight of day had not made in him before.  His coat was like polished jet.  Every hair in his body glistened black.  Black!  That was it.  And Nature was trying to tell Maheegun that of all the creatures hated by her kind, the creature which they feared and hated most was black.  With her it was not experience, but instinct—­telling her of the age-old feud between the gray wolf and the black bear.  And Baree’s coat, in the moonlight and the snow, was blacker than Wakayoo’s had ever been in the fish-fattening days of May.  Until they struck the broad openings of the plain, the young she-wolf had followed Baree without hesitation; now there was a gathering strangeness and indecision in her manner, and twice she stopped and would have let Baree go on without her.

An hour after they entered the plain there came suddenly out of the west the tonguing of the wolf pack.  It was not far distant, probably not more than a mile along the foot of the ridge, and the sharp, quick yapping that followed the first outburst was evidence that the long-fanged hunters had put up sudden game, a caribou or young moose, and were close at its heels.  At the voice of her own people Maheegun laid her ears close to her head and was off like an arrow from a bow.

The unexpectedness of her movement and the swiftness of her flight put Baree well behind her in the race over the plain.  She was running blindly, favored by luck.  For an interval of perhaps five minutes the pack were so near to their game that they made no sound, and the chase swung full into the face of Maheegun and Baree.  The latter was not half a dozen lengths behind the young wolf when a crashing in the brush directly ahead stopped them so sharply that they tore up the snow with their braced forefeet and squat haunches.  Ten seconds later a caribou burst through and flashed across a clearing not more than twenty yards from where they stood.  They could hear its swift panting as it disappeared.  And then came the pack.