Thirty-six hours before this Kazan and Gray Wolf had left a half of their last kill a mile of two farther back on the plain.  The kill was one of the big barren rabbits, and Gray Wolf turned in its direction.  She did not require sight to find it.  In her was developed to its finest point that sixth sense of the animal kingdom, the sense of orientation, and as straight as a pigeon might have winged its flight she cut through the bush to the spot where they had cached the rabbit.  A white fox had been there ahead of her, and she found only scattered bits of hair and fur.  What the fox had left the moose-birds and bush-jays had carried away.  Hungrily Gray Wolf turned back to the river.

That night she slept again where Kazan had lain, and three times she called for him without answer.  A heavy dew fell, and it drenched the last vestige of her mate’s scent out of the sand.  But still through the day that followed, and the day that followed that, blind Gray Wolf clung to the narrow rim of white sand.  On the fourth day her hunger reached a point where she gnawed the bark from willow bushes.  It was on this day that she made a discovery.  She was drinking, when her sensitive nose touched something in the water’s edge that was smooth, and bore a faint odor of flesh.  It was one of the big northern river clams.  She pawed it ashore, sniffing at the hard shell.  Then she crunched it between her teeth.  She had never tasted sweeter meat than that which she found inside, and she began hunting for other clams.  She found many of them, and ate until she was no longer hungry.  For three days more she remained on the bar.

And then, one night, the call came to her.  It set her quivering with a strange new excitement—­something that may have been a new hope, and in the moonlight she trotted nervously up and down the shining strip of sand, facing now the north, and now the south, and then the east and the west—­her head flung up, listening, as if in the soft wind of the night she was trying to locate the whispering lure of a wonderful voice.  And whatever it was that came to her came from out of the south and east.  Off there—­across the barren, far beyond the outer edge of the northern timber-line—­was home.  And off there, in her brute way, she reasoned that she must find Kazan.  The call did not come from their old windfall home in the swamp.  It came from beyond that, and in a flashing vision there rose through her blindness a picture of the towering Sun Rock, of the winding trail that led to it, and the cabin on the plain.  It was there that blindness had come to her.  It was there that day had ended, and eternal night had begun.  And it was there that she had mothered her first-born.  Nature had registered these things so that they could never be wiped out of her memory, and when the call came it was from the sunlit world where she had last known light and life and had last seen the moon and the stars in the blue night of the skies.