By dawn he had reached the river, within three miles of the sand-bar.  Scarcely was the sun up when he stood on the white strip of sand where he and Gray Wolf had come down to drink.  Expectantly and confidently he looked about him for Gray Wolf, whining softly, and wagging his tail.  He began to search for her scent, but rains had washed even her footprints from the clean sand.  All that day he searched for her along the river and out on the plain.  He went to where they had killed their last rabbit.  He sniffed at the bushes where the poison baits had hung.  Again and again he sat back on his haunches and sent out his mating cry to her.  And slowly, as he did these things, nature was working in him that miracle of the wild which the Crees have named the “spirit call.”  As it had worked in Gray Wolf, so now it stirred the blood of Kazan.  With the going of the sun, and the sweeping about him of shadowy night, he turned more and more to the south and east.  His whole world was made up of the trails over which he had hunted.  Beyond those places he did not know that there was such a thing as existence.  And in that world, small in his understanding of things, was Gray Wolf.  He could not miss her.  That world, in his comprehension of it, ran from the McFarlane in a narrow trail through the forests and over the plains to the little valley from which the beavers had driven them.  If Gray Wolf was not here—­she was there, and tirelessly he resumed his quest of her.

Not until the stars were fading out of the sky again, and gray day was giving place to night, did exhaustion and hunger stop him.  He killed a rabbit, and for hours after he had feasted he lay close to his kill, and slept.  Then he went on.

The fourth night he came to the little valley between the two ridges, and under the stars, more brilliant now in the chill clearness of the early autumn nights, he followed the creek down into their old swamp home.  It was broad day when he reached the edge of the great beaver pond that now completely surrounded the windfall under which Gray-Wolf’s second-born had come into the world.  Broken Tooth and the other beavers had wrought a big change in what had once been his home and Gray Wolf’s, and for many minutes Kazan stood silent and motionless at the edge of the pond, sniffing the air heavy with the unpleasant odor of the usurpers.  Until now his spirit had remained unbroken.  Footsore, with thinned sides and gaunt head, he circled slowly through the swamp.  All that day he searched.  And his crest lay flat now, and there was a hunted look in the droop of his shoulders and in the shifting look of his eyes.  Gray Wolf was gone.