This time Kazan felt and scented more of that mysterious change in the cabin.  Joan and her husband talked incessantly of their plans when they were together; and when the man was away Joan talked to the baby, and to him.  And each time that he came down to the cabin during the week that followed, he grew more and more restless, until at last the man noticed the change in him.

“I believe he knows,” he said to Joan one evening.  “I believe he knows we’re preparing to leave.”  Then he added:  “The river was rising again to-day.  It will be another week before we can start, perhaps longer.”

That same night the moon flooded the top of the Sun Rock with a golden light, and out into the glow of it came Gray Wolf, with her three little whelps toddling behind her.  There was much about these soft little balls that tumbled about him and snuggled in his tawny coat that reminded Kazan of the baby.  At times they made the same queer, soft little sounds, and they staggered about on their four little legs just as helplessly as baby Joan made her way about on two.  He did not fondle them, as Gray Wolf did, but the touch of them, and their babyish whimperings, filled him with a kind of pleasure that he had never experienced before.

The moon was straight above them, and the night was almost as bright as day, when he went down again to hunt for Gray Wolf.  At the foot of the rock a big white rabbit popped up ahead of him, and he gave chase.  For half a mile he pursued, until the wolf instinct in him rose over the dog, and he gave up the futile race.  A deer he might have overtaken, but small game the wolf must hunt as the fox hunts it, and he began to slip through the thickets slowly and as quietly as a shadow.  He was a mile from the Sun Rock when two quick leaps put Gray Wolf’s supper between his jaws.  He trotted back slowly, dropping the big seven-pound snow-shoe hare now and then to rest.

When he came to the narrow trail that led to the top of the Sun Rock he stopped.  In that trail was the warm scent of strange feet.  The rabbit fell from his jaws.  Every hair in his body was suddenly electrified into life.  What he scented was not the scent of a rabbit, a marten or a porcupine.  Fang and claw had climbed the path ahead of him.  And then, coming faintly to him from the top of the rock, he heard sounds which sent him up with a terrible whining cry.  When he reached the summit he saw in the white moonlight a scene that stopped him for a single moment.  Close to the edge of the sheer fall to the rocks, fifty feet below, Gray Wolf was engaged in a death-struggle with a huge gray lynx.  She was down—­and under, and from her there came a sudden sharp terrible cry of pain.