Baree’s quest for Nepeese became now more or less involuntary, a sort of daily routine.  For a week he made his burrow in the dog corral, and at least twice between dawn and darkness he would go to the birchbark tepee and the chasm.  His trail, soon beaten hard in the snow, became as fixed as Pierrot’s trap line.  It cut straight through the forest to the tepee, swinging slightly to the east so that it crossed the frozen surface of the Willow’s swimming pool.  From the tepee it swung in a circle through a part of the forest where Nepeese had frequently gathered armfuls of crimson fireflowers, and then to the chasm.  Up and down the edge of the gorge it went, down into the little cup at the bottom of the chasm, and thence straight back to the dog corral.

And then, of a sudden, Baree made a change.  He spent a night in the tepee.  After that, whenever he was at the Gray Loon, during the day he always slept in the tepee.  The two blankets were his bed—­and they were a part of Nepeese.  And there, all through the long winter, he waited.

If Nepeese had returned in February and could have taken him unaware, she would have found a changed Baree.  He was more than ever like a wolf; yet he never gave the wolf howl now, and always he snarled deep in his throat when he heard the cry of the pack.  For several weeks the old trap line had supplied him with meat, but now he hunted.  The tepee, in and out, was scattered with fur and bones.  Once—­alone—­he caught a young deer in deep snow and killed it.  Again, in the heart of a fierce February storm, he pursued a bull caribou so closely that it plunged over a cliff and broke its neck.  He lived well, and in size and strength he was growing swiftly into a giant of his kind.  In another six months he would be as large as Kazan, and his jaws were almost as powerful, even now.

Three times that winter Baree fought—­once with a lynx that sprang down upon him from a windfall while he was eating a freshly killed rabbit, and twice with two lone wolves.  The lynx tore him unmercifully before it fled into the windfall.  The younger of the wolves he killed; the other fight was a draw.  More and more he became an outcast, living alone with his dreams and his smoldering hopes.

And Baree did dream.  Many times, as he lay in the tepee, he would hear the voice of Nepeese.  He would hear her sweet voice calling, her laughter, the sound of his name. and often he would start up to his feet—­the old Baree for a thrilling moment or two—­only to lie down in his nest again with a low, grief-filled whine.  And always when he heard the snap of a twig or some other sound in the forest, it was thought of Nepeese that flashed first into his brain.  Some day she would return.  That belief was a part of his existence as much as the sun and the moon and the stars.

The winter passed, and spring came, and still Baree continued to haunt his old trails, even going now and then over the old trap line as far as the first of the two cabins.  The traps were rusted and sprung now; the thawing snow disclosed bones and feathers between their jaws.  Under the deadfalls were remnants of fur, and out on the ice of the lakes were picked skeletons of foxes and wolves that had taken the poison baits.  The last snow went.  The swollen streams sang in the forests and canyons.  The grass turned green, and the first flowers came.