Gray Wolf was haunted by constant fear.  In her blindness she knew that they were surrounded by the menace of men.  To Kazan what was coming to pass had more and more ceased to fill him with fear and caution.  Three times that week he heard the shouts of men—­and once he heard a white man’s laughter and the barking of dogs as their master tossed them their daily feed of fish.  In the air he caught the pungent scent of camp-fires and one night, in the far distance, he heard a wild snatch of song, followed by the yelping and barking of a dog-pack.

Slowly and surely the lure of man drew him nearer to the post—­a mile to-night, two miles to-morrow, but always nearer.  And Gray Wolf, fighting her losing fight to the end, sensed in the danger-filled air the nearness of that hour when he would respond to the final call and she would be left alone.

These were days of activity and excitement at the fur company’s post, the days of accounting, of profit and of pleasure;—­the days when the wilderness poured in its treasure of fur, to be sent a little later to London and Paris and the capitals of Europe.  And this year there was more than the usual interest in the foregathering of the forest people.  The plague had wrought its terrible havoc, and not until the fur-hunters had come to answer to the spring roll-call would it be known accurately who had lived and who had died.

The Chippewans and half-breeds from the south began to arrive first, with their teams of mongrel curs, picked up along the borders of civilization.  Close after them came the hunters from the western barren lands, bringing with them loads of white fox and caribou skins, and an army of big-footed, long-legged Mackenzie hounds that pulled like horses and wailed like whipped puppies when the huskies and Eskimo dogs set upon them.  Packs of fierce Labrador dogs, never vanquished except by death, came from close to Hudson’s Bay.  Team after team of little yellow and gray Eskimo dogs, as quick with their fangs as were their black and swift-running masters with their hands and feet, met the much larger and dark-colored Malemutes from the Athabasca.  Enemies of all these packs of fierce huskies trailed in from all sides, fighting, snapping and snarling, with the lust of killing deep born in them from their wolf progenitors.

There was no cessation in the battle of the fangs.  It began with the first brute arrivals.  It continued from dawn through the day and around the camp-fires at night.  There was never an end to the strife between the dogs, and between the men and the dogs.  The snow was trailed and stained with blood and the scent of it added greater fierceness to the wolf-breeds.

Half a dozen battles were fought to the death each day and night.  Those that died were chiefly the south-bred curs—­mixtures of mastiff, Great Dane, and sheep-dog—­and the fatally slow Mackenzie hounds.  About the post rose the smoke of a hundred camp-fires, and about these fires gathered the women and the children of the hunters.  When the snow was no longer fit for sledging, Williams, the factor, noted that there were many who had not come, and the accounts of these he later scratched out of his ledgers knowing that they were victims of the plague.