In winter the snow lay over the land like a dead white pall, and food was scarce. The wolves sat round in a circle, gnashed their teeth, and wailed long and plaintively through the night, their noses pointed at the moon.
Five days back, on a steep slope of the valley not far from the wolf track to a watering place, and close to a belt of young fir-trees surrounded by a snow-topped coppice, some men from a neighbouring farm had set a powerful wolf-trap, above which they had thrown a dead calf. On their nocturnal prowls the wolves discovered the carcase. For a long time they sat round it in the grey darkness, howling plaintively, hungrily gnashing their fangs, afraid to move nearer, and each one timidly jostling the other forward with cruel vicious eyes.
At last one young wolf's hunger overcame his fear; he threw himself on the calf with a shrill squeal, and after him rushed the rest, whining, growling, raising their tails, bending their bony backs, bristling the hair on their short thick necks—and into the trap fell the leader's mate.
They paid no attention to her, but eagerly devoured the calf, and it was only when they had finished and cleared away all traces of the orgy that they realised the she-wolf was trapped there for good.
All night she howled and threw herself about, saliva falling from her dripping jaws, her eyes rolling wildly and emitting little sparks of green fire as she circled round and round on a clanking chain. In the morning two farm-hands arrived, threw her on their sleigh and drove away.
The leader remained alone the whole day. Then, when night again returned, he called his band together, tore one young wolf to pieces, rushed round with lowered head and bristling hair, finally leaving the pack and returning to his lair. The wolves submitted to his terrible punishment, for he was their chief, who had seized power by force, and they patiently awaited his return, thinking he had gone on a solitary food-hunt.
But as the night advanced and he did not come, they began to howl their urgent summons to him, and now there was an undercurrent of menace in their cries, the lust to kill, for the code of the wild beasts prescribed only one penalty for the leader who deserted his pack—death!
II
All through that night, and the following days and nights, the old wolf lay immovable in his lair. At last, with drooping head, he rose from his resting-place, stretched himself mournfully, first on his fore-paws, then on his hind-legs, arched his back, gnashed his fangs and licked the snow with his clotted tongue. The sky was still shrouded in a dense, velvety darkness: the snow was hard, and glittered like a million points of white light. The moon—a dark red orb—was blotted over with ragged masses of inky clouds and was fast disappearing on the right of the horizon; on the left, a crimson dawn full of menace was slowly breaking. The snow-wind blew and whistled overhead. Around the wolf, under a bleak sky, were fallen pines and little fir trees cloaked with snow.
He moved up to a lone, naked waste above the valley, emerged from the wood, and stood with lowered head by its border, listening and sniffing. Here the wind blew more strongly, the trees cracked and groaned, and from the wide dark expanse of open country came a sense of dreary emptiness and bitter cold.