Each moment added to his excitement He ran about the sapling, gulped mouthfuls of the bloody snow, and each time he paused for a moment with his open dripping jaws held toward the dead buck on the rock.

The game was very near.

Brute sense told him that.

Oh, the longing that was in him, the twitching, quivering longing to kill--kill--kill! He made another effort, tore up the snow in his frantic endeavors to free himself, to break loose, to follow in the wild glad cry of freed savagery in the calling of his people.

He failed again, panting, whining in piteous helplessness.
Then he settled upon his haunches at the end of his babeesh thong.
For a moment his head turned to the moonlit sky, his long nose poised at right angles to the bristling hollows between his shoulders.
There came then a low, whining wail, like the beginning of the "death-song" of a husky dog--a wail that grew in length and in strength and in volume until it rose weirdly among the mountains and swept far out over the plains--the hunt call of the wolf on the trail, which calls to him the famished, gray-gaunt outlaws of the wilderness, as the bugler's notes call his fellows on the field of battle.
Three times that blood-thrilling cry went up from the captive wolf's throat, and before those cries had died away the three hunters were perched upon their platforms among the spruce.
There followed now the ominous, waiting silence of an awakened wilderness.