They were following the shore of a lake.  Suddenly they came around the end of a point, and all of Fort O’ God lay on the rising shelf of the shore ahead of them.  The growl died in Miki’s throat.  His teeth shut with a last click.  For an instant his heart seemed to grow dead and still.  Until this moment his world had held only half a dozen human beings.  Now, so suddenly that he had no flash of warning, he saw a hundred of them, two hundred, three hundred.  At sight of Durant and the cage a swarm of them began running down to the shore.  And everywhere there were wolves, so many of them that his senses grew dazed as he stared.  His cage was the centre of a clamouring, gesticulating horde of men and boys as it was dragged up the slope.  Women began joining the crowd, many of them with small children in their arms.  Then his journey came to an end.  He was close to another cage, and in that cage was a beast like himself.  Beside this cage there stood a tall, swarthy, shaggy-headed halfbreed who looked like a pirate.  The man was Grouse Piet, Durant’s rival.

A contemptuous leer was on his thick-lipped face as he looked at Miki.  He turned, and to the group of dark-faced Indians and breeds about him he said something that roused a guttural laugh.

Durant’s face flamed red.

“Laugh, you heathen,” he challenged, “but don’t forget that Henri Durant is here to take your bets!” Then he shook the two cross and ten red foxes in the face of Grouse Piet.

“Cover them, Grouse Piet,” he cried.  “And I have ten times more where they came from!”

With his muzzle lifted, Miki was sniffing the air.  It was filled with strange scents, heavy with the odours of men, of dogs, and of the five huge caribou roasting on their spits fifteen feet over the big fires that were built under them.  For ten hours those caribou would roast, turning slowly on spits as thick as a man’s leg.  The fight was to come before the feast.

For an hour the clatter and tumult of voices hovered about the two cages.  Men appraised the fighters and made their bets, and Grouse Piet and Henri Durant made their throats hoarse flinging banter and contempt at each other.  At the end of the hour the crowd began to thin out.  In the place of men and women half a hundred dark-visaged little children crowded about the cages.  It was not until then that Miki caught glimpses of the hordes of beasts fastened in ones and twos and groups in the edge of the clearing.  His nostrils had at last caught the distinction.  They were not wolves.  They were like himself.

It was a long time before his eyes rested steadily on the wolf-dog in the other cage.  He went to the edge of his bars and sniffed.  The wolf-dog thrust his gaunt muzzle toward him.  He made Miki think of the huge wolf he had fought one day on the edge of the cliff, and instinctively he showed his fangs, and snarled.  The wolf-dog snarled back.  Henri Durant rubbed his hands exultantly, and Grouse Piet laughed softly.