Gray Wolf slunk closer to Kazan.  She muzzled his neck and Kazan gave her a swift dog-like caress of his tongue, assuring her that all was well.  She flattened herself in the snow when the dogs had finished and came up in their dog way to sniff at her, and make closer acquaintance with Kazan.  Kazan towered over her, guarding her.  One huge red-eyed dog who still dragged the bit of babiche trace muzzled Gray Wolf’s soft neck for a fraction of a second too long, and Kazan uttered a savage snarl of warning.  The dog drew back, and for a moment their fangs gleamed over Gray Wolf’s blind face.  It was the Challenge of the Breed.

The big husky was the leader of the pack, and if one of the other dogs had snarled at him, as Kazan snarled he would have leaped at his throat.  But in Kazan, standing fierce and half wild over Gray Wolf, he recognized none of the serfdom of the sledge-dogs.  It was master facing master; in Kazan it was more than that for he was Gray Wolf’s mate.  In an instant more he would have leaped over her body to have fought for her, more than for the right of leadership.  But the big husky turned away sullenly, growling, still snarling, and vented his rage by nipping fiercely at the flank of one of his sledge-mates.

Gray Wolf understood what had happened, though she could not see.  She shrank closer to Kazan.  She knew that the moon and the stars had looked down on that thing that always meant death—­the challenge to the right of mate.  With her luring coyness, whining and softly muzzling his shoulder and neck, she tried to draw Kazan away from the pad-beaten circle in which the bull lay.  Kazan’s answer was an ominous rolling of smothered thunder deep down in his throat.  He lay down beside her, licked her blind face swiftly, and faced the stranger dogs.

The moon sank lower and lower and at last dropped behind the western forests.  The stars grew paler.  One by one they faded from the sky and after a time there followed the cold gray dawn of the North.  In that dawn the big husky leader rose from the hole he had made in the snow and returned to the bull.  Kazan, alert, was on his feet in an instant and stood also close to the bull.  The two circled ominously, their heads lowered, their crests bristling.  The husky drew away, and Kazan crouched at the bull’s neck and began tearing at the frozen flesh.  He was not hungry.  But in this way he showed his right to the flesh, his defiance of the right of the big husky.

For a few seconds he forgot Gray Wolf.  The husky had slipped back like a shadow and now he stood again over Gray Wolf, sniffing her neck and body.  Then he whined.  In that whine were the passion, the invitation, the demand of the Wild.  So quickly that the eye could scarcely follow her movement faithful Gray Wolf sank her gleaming fangs in the husky’s shoulder.

A gray streak—­nothing more tangible than a streak of gray, silent and terrible, shot through the dawn-gloom.  It was Kazan.  He came without a snarl, without a cry, and in a moment he and the husky were in the throes of terrific battle.