He jumped to his feet, staring off into the bush.

A quarter of a mile away Gray Wolf had caught the dreaded scent of man in the wind, and was giving voice to her warning.  It was a long wailing howl, and not until its last echoes had died away did Sandy McTrigger move.  Then he returned to the canoe, took out his old gun, put a fresh cap on the nipple and disappeared quickly over the edge of the bank.

For a week Kazan and Gray Wolf had been wandering about the headwaters of the McFarlane and this was the first time since the preceding winter that Gray Wolf had caught the scent of man in the air.  When the wind brought the danger-signal to her she was alone.  Two or three minutes before the scent came to her Kazan had left her side in swift pursuit of a snow-shoe rabbit, and she lay flat on her belly under a bush, waiting for him.  In these moments when she was alone Gray Wolf was constantly sniffing the air.  Blindness had developed her scent and hearing until they were next to infallible.  First she had heard the rattle of Sandy McTrigger’s paddle against the side of his canoe a quarter of a mile away.  Scent had followed swiftly.  Five minutes after her warning howl Kazan stood at her side, his head flung up, his jaws open and panting.  Sandy had hunted Arctic foxes, and he was using the Eskimo tactics now, swinging in a half-circle until he should come up in the face of the wind.  Kazan caught a single whiff of the man-tainted air and his spine grew stiff.  But blind Gray Wolf was keener than the little red-eyed fox of the North.  Her pointed nose slowly followed Sandy’s progress.  She heard a dry stick crack under his feet three hundred yards away.  She caught the metallic click of his gun-barrel as it struck a birch sapling.  The moment she lost Sandy in the wind she whined and rubbed herself against Kazan and trotted a few steps to the southwest.

At times such as this Kazan seldom refused to take guidance from her.  They trotted away side by side and by the time Sandy was creeping up snake-like with the wind in his face, Kazan was peering from the fringe of river brush down upon the canoe on the white strip of sand.  When Sandy returned, after an hour of futile stalking, two fresh tracks led straight down to the canoe.  He looked at them in amazement and then a sinister grin wrinkled his ugly face.  He chuckled as he went to his kit and dug out a small rubber bag.  From this he drew a tightly corked bottle, filled with gelatine capsules.  In each little capsule were five grains of strychnine.  There were dark hints that once upon a time Sandy McTrigger had tried one of these capsules by dropping it in a cup of coffee and giving it to a man, but the police had never proved it.  He was expert in the use of poison.  Probably he had killed a thousand foxes in his time, and he chuckled again as he counted out a dozen of the capsules and thought how easy it would be to get this inquisitive pair of wolves.  Two or three days before he had killed