At sight of those swiftly moving gray bodies Baree’s heart leaped for an instant into his throat.  He forgot Maheegun, and that she had run away from him.  The moon and the stars went out of existence for him.  He no longer sensed the chill of the snow under his feet.  He was wolf—­all wolf.  With the warm scent of the caribou in his nostrils, and the passion to kill sweeping through him like fire, he darted after the pack.

Even at that, Maheegun was a bit ahead of him.  He did not miss her.  In the excitement of his first chase he no longer felt the desire to have her at his side.  Very soon he found himself close to the flanks of one of the gray monsters of the pack.  Half a minute later a new hunter swept in from the bush behind him, and then a second, and after that a third.  At times he was running shoulder to shoulder with his new companions.  He heard the whining excitement in their throats; the snap of their jaws as they ran—­and in the golden moonlight ahead of him the sound of a caribou as it plunged through thickets and over windfalls in its race for life.

It was as if Baree had belonged to the pack always.  He had joined it naturally, as other stray wolves had joined it from out of the bush.  There had been no ostentation, no welcome such as Maheegun had given him in the open, and no hostility.  He belonged with these slim, swift-footed outlaws of the old forests, and his own jaws snapped and his blood ran hot as the smell of the caribou grew heavier, and the sound of its crashing body nearer.

It seemed to him they were almost at its heels when they swept into an open plain, a stretch of barren without a tree or a shrub, brilliant in the light of the stars and moon.  Across its unbroken carpet of snow sped the caribou a spare hundred yards ahead of the pack.  Now the two leading hunters no longer followed directly in the trail, but shot out at an angle, one to the right and the other to the left of the pursued, and like well-trained soldiers the pack split in halves and spread out fan shape in the final charge.

The two ends of the fan forged ahead and closed in, until the leaders were running almost abreast of the caribou, with fifty or sixty feet separating them from the pursued.  Thus, adroitly and swiftly, with deadly precision, the pack had formed a horseshoe cordon of fangs from which there was but one course of flight—­straight ahead.  For the caribou to swerve half a degree to the right or left meant death.  It was the duty of the leaders to draw in the ends of the horseshoe now, until one or both of them could make the fatal lunge for the hamstrings.  After that it would be a simple matter.  The pack would close in over the caribou like an inundation.