For a long time he sat and listened after that howl.  He had found voice—­a voice with a strange new note in it, and it gave him still greater confidence.  He had expected an answer, but none came.  He had traveled in the face of the wind, and as he howled, a bull moose crashed through the scrub timber ahead of him, his horns rattling against the trees like the tattoo of a clear birch club as he put distance between himself and that cry.

Twice Kazan howled before he went on, and he found joy in the practise of that new note.  He came then to the foot of a rough ridge, and turned up out of the swamp to the top of it.  The stars and the moon were nearer to him there, and on the other side of the ridge he looked down upon a great sweeping plain, with a frozen lake glistening in the moonlight, and a white river leading from it off into timber that was neither so thick nor so black as that in the swamp.

And then every muscle in his body grew tense, and his blood leaped.  From far off in the plain there came a cry.  It was his cry—­the wolf-cry.  His jaws snapped.  His white fangs gleamed, and he growled deep in his throat.  He wanted to reply, but some strange instinct urged him not to.  That instinct of the wild was already becoming master of him.  In the air, in the whispering of the spruce-tops, in the moon and the stars themselves, there breathed a spirit which told him that what he had heard was the wolf-cry, but that it was not the wolf call.

The other came an hour later, clear and distinct, that same wailing howl at the beginning—­but ending in a staccato of quick sharp yelps that stirred his blood at once into a fiery excitement that it had never known before.  The same instinct told him that this was the call—­the hunt-cry.  It urged him to come quickly.  A few moments later it came again, and this time there was a reply from close down along the foot of the ridge, and another from so far away that Kazan could scarcely hear it.  The hunt-pack was gathering for the night chase; but Kazan sat quiet and trembling.

He was not afraid, but he was not ready to go.  The ridge seemed to split the world for him.  Down there it was new, and strange, and without men.  From the other side something seemed pulling him back, and suddenly he turned his head and gazed back through the moonlit space behind him, and whined.  It was the dog-whine now.  The woman was back there.  He could hear her voice.  He could feel the touch of her soft hand.  He could see the laughter in her face and eyes, the laughter that had made him warm and happy.  She was calling to him through the forests, and he was torn between desire to answer that call, and desire to go down into the plain.  For he could also see many men waiting for him with clubs, and he could hear the cracking of whips, and feel the sting of their lashes.

For a long time he remained on the top of the ridge that divided his world.  And then, at last, he turned and went down into the plain.