And then Kazan saw the terrible work of the lynx.  For Gray Wolf was blind—­not for a day or a night, but blind for all time.  A gloom that no sun could break had become her shroud.  And perhaps again it was that instinct of animal creation, which often is more wonderful than man’s reason, that told Kazan what had happened.  For he knew now that she was helpless—­more helpless than the little creatures that had gamboled in the moonlight a few hours before.  He remained close beside her all that day.

[Illustration:  Kazan gripped at its throat]

Vainly that day did Joan call for Kazan.  Her voice rose to the Sun Rock, and Gray Wolf’s head snuggled closer to Kazan, and Kazan’s ears dropped back, and he licked her wounds.  Late in the afternoon Kazan left Gray Wolf long enough to run to the bottom of the trail and bring up the snow-shoe rabbit.  Gray Wolf muzzled the fur and flesh, but would not eat.  Still a little later Kazan urged her to follow him to the trail.  He no longer wanted to stay at the top of the Sun Rock, and he no longer wanted Gray Wolf to stay there.  Step by step he drew her down the winding path away from her dead puppies.  She would move only when he was very near her—­so near that she could touch his scarred flank with her nose.

They came at last to the point in the trail where they had to leap down a distance of three or four feet from the edge of a rock, and here Kazan saw how utterly helpless Gray Wolf had become.  She whined, and crouched twenty times before she dared make the spring, and then she jumped stiff-legged, and fell in a heap at Kazan’s feet.  After this Kazan did not have to urge her so hard, for the fall impinged on her the fact that she was safe only when her muzzle touched her mate’s flank.  She followed him obediently when they reached the plain, trotting with her foreshoulder to his hip.

Kazan was heading for a thicket in the creek bottom half a mile away, and a dozen times in that short distance Gray Wolf stumbled and fell.  And each time that she fell Kazan learned a little more of the limitations of blindness.  Once he sprang off in pursuit of a rabbit, but he had not taken twenty leaps when he stopped and looked back.  Gray Wolf had not moved an inch.  She stood motionless, sniffing the air—­waiting for him!  For a full minute Kazan stood, also waiting.  Then he returned to her.  Ever after this he returned to the point where he had left Gray Wolf, knowing that he would find her there.

All that day they remained in the thicket.  In the afternoon he visited the cabin.  Joan and her husband were there, and both saw at once Kazan’s torn side and his lacerated head and shoulders.

“Pretty near a finish fight for him,” said the man, after he had examined him.  “It was either a lynx or a bear.  Another wolf could not do that.”