Northern Trails, Book I. | Page 9

the shallows, darting like kingfishers over the points,
and jumping like wild goats from rock to rock. In an hour they were far
up the mountain, lying side by side on a great flat rock, looking across
a deep impassable valley and over two rounded hilltops, where the
scrub spruces looked like pins on a cushion, to the bare, rugged hillside
where Megaleep stood out like a watchman against the blue sky.
"Does he see us, little brother?" whispered Mooka, quivering with
excitement and panting from the rapid climb.
"See us? sartin, little sister; but that only make him want peek um some
more," said the little hunter. And raised carelessly on his elbows he was
telling Mooka how Megaleep the caribou trusted only his nose, and
how he watched and played peekaboo with anything which he could
not smell, and how in a snowstorm--
Noel was off now like a brook, babbling a deal of caribou lore which he
had learned from Old Tomah the hunter, when Mooka, whose restless
black eyes were always wandering, seized his arm.

"Hush, brother, and look, oh, look! there on the big rock!"
Noel's eyes had already caught the Indian trick of seeing only what they
look for, and so of separating an animal instantly from his surroundings,
however well he hides. That is why the whole hillside seemed suddenly
to vanish, spruces and harebells, snow-fields and drifting white clouds
all grouping themselves, like the unnoticed frame of a picture, around a
great gray rock with a huge shaggy she-wolf keeping watch over it,
silent, alert, motionless.
Something stirred in the shadow of the old wolf's watch-tower, tossing
and eddying and growing suddenly quiet, as if the wind were playing
among dead oak leaves. The keen young eyes saw it instantly, dilating
with surprise and excitement. The next instant they had clutched each
other's arms.
"Ooooo!" from Mooka.
"Cubs; keep still!" from Noel.
And shrinking close to the rock under a friendly dwarf spruce they lay
still as two rabbits, watching with round eyes, eager but unafraid, the
antics of three brown wolf cubs that were chasing the flies and
tumbling over some invisible plaything before the door of the den.
Hardly had they made the discovery when the old wolf slipped down
from the rock and stood for an instant over her little ones. Why the play
should stop now, while the breeze was still their comrade and the
sunshine was brighter than ever, or why they should steal away into the
dark den more silently than they had come, none of the cubs could tell.
They felt the order and they obeyed instantly--and that is always the
wonder of watching little wild things at play. The old mother wolf
vanished among the rocks and appeared again higher on the ridge,
turning her head uneasily to try every breeze and rustle and moving
shadow. Then she went questing into the spruce woods, feeling but not
understanding some subtle excitement in the air that was not there
before, and only the two Indian children were left keeping watch over
the great wild hillside.
For over an hour they lay there expectantly, but nothing stirred near the
den; then they too slipped away, silently as the little wild things, and
made their slow way down the brook, hand in hand in the deepening
shadows. Scarcely had they gone when the bushes stirred and the old
she-wolf, that had been ranging every ridge and valley since she

disappeared at the unknown alarm, glided over the spot where a
moment before Mooka and Noel had been watching. Swiftly, silently
she followed their steps; found the old trails coming up and the fresh
trails returning; then, sure at last that no danger threatened her own
little ones, she loped away up the hill and over the topmost ridge to the
caribou barrens and the thickets where young rabbits were already
stirring about in the twilight.
That night, in the cabin under the cliffs, Old Tomah had to rehearse
again all the wolf lore learned in sixty years of hunting: how,
fortunately for the deer, these enormous wolves had never been
abundant and were now very rare, a few having been shot, and more
poisoned in the starving times, and the rest having vanished,
mysteriously as wolves do, for some unknown reason. Bears, which are
easily trapped and shot and whose skins are worth each a month's
wages to the fishermen, still hold their own and even increase on the
great island; while the wolves, once more numerous, are slowly
vanishing, though they are never hunted, and not even Old Tomah
himself could set a trap cunningly enough to catch one. The old hunter
told, while Mooka and Noel held their breaths and drew closer to the
light, how once,