He began to depend upon Gray Wolf.  She would point out the hiding-place of a partridge fifty yards from their trail.  In their hunts she became the leader—­until game was found.  And as Kazan learned to trust to her in the hunt, so he began just as instinctively to heed her warnings.  If Gray Wolf reasoned, it was to the effect that without Kazan she would die.  She had tried hard now and then to catch a partridge, or a rabbit, but she had always failed.  Kazan meant life to her.  And—­if she reasoned—­it was to make herself indispensable to her mate.  Blindness had made her different than she would otherwise have been.  Again nature promised motherhood to her.  But she did not—­as she would have done in the open, and with sight—­hold more and more aloof from Kazan as the days passed.  It was her habit, spring, summer and winter, to snuggle close to Kazan and lie with her beautiful head resting on his neck or back.  If Kazan snarled at her she did not snap back, but slunk down as though struck a blow.  With her warm tongue she would lick away the ice that froze to the long hair between Kazan’s toes.  For days after he had run a sliver in his paw she nursed his foot.  Blindness had made Kazan absolutely necessary to her existence—­and now, in a different way, she became more and more necessary to Kazan.  They were happy in their swamp home.  There was plenty of small game about them, and it was warm under the windfall.  Rarely did they go beyond the limits of the swamp to hunt.  Out on the more distant plains and the barren ridges they occasionally heard the cry of the wolf-pack on the trail of meat, but it no longer thrilled them with a desire to join in the chase.

One day they struck farther than usual to the west.  They left the swamp, crossed a plain over which a fire had swept the preceding year, climbed a ridge, and descended into a second plain.  At the bottom Gray Wolf stopped and sniffed the air.  At these times Kazan always watched her, waiting eagerly and nervously if the scent was too faint for him to catch.  But to-day he caught the edge of it, and he knew why Gray Wolf’s ears flattened, and her hindquarters drooped.  The scent of game would have made her rigid and alert.  But it was not the game smell.  It was human, and Gray Wolf slunk behind Kazan and whined.  For several minutes they stood without moving or making a sound, and then Kazan led the way on.  Less than three hundred yards away they came to a thick clump of scrub spruce, and almost ran into a snow-smothered tepee.  It was abandoned.  Life and fire had not been there for a long time.  But from the tepee had come the man-smell.  With legs rigid and his spine quivering Kazan approached the opening to the tepee.  He looked in.  In the middle of the tepee, lying on the charred embers of a fire, lay a ragged blanket—­and in the blanket was wrapped the body of a little Indian child.  Kazan could see the tiny moccasined feet.  But so long had death been there that he could scarcely