He ran, with his smooth, loose, effortless lope, perhaps a quarter of a mile, then stopped, and putting up his head, howled a howl so full of hopeless, cruel yearning, so vibrant with desolation, that it sounded like the cry of a soul doomed forever to seek something it could never find. It was a lugubrious yowl there, in that setting, and it made one's scalp creep all over one's cranium.
And instantly almost, even as the last, long, horrible echoes died, sobbing adown the blue-haze perspective of the forest glades, the answer came—a far-away, fluttering, wandering howl, like the moan of the wind in its sleep.
The white wolf waited a moment, then howled again, and the ghastly sound came back to him, louder and nearer this time.
A third time he howled, and the forest cringed under the reply.
Then at last the shadows between the ranked tree-trunks took unto themselves life, and eyes, eyes in pairs, horribly hungry, cruel port-holes of brains, with a glary, stary, green light behind them, suddenly appeared everywhere, like swiftly-turned-on electric lamps. There was a whispering rush, as if giants were swiftly dealing cards in the silence, and—the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was away, racing like a cloud-shadow, rapid and impetuous as a greyhound, at the head of a pack of one hundred and twenty-nine empty-stomached wolves.
They made no sound as they tore, compact as a Zulu impi, over the spotless white, because they had no trail to follow, only this huge devil of a leader; and they had their work cut out to follow him, for he was the longest-legged male wolf any of them had ever set eyes upon.
Straight as a twelve-inch shell the white wolf headed back to the fallen trees and the bear's den. When he reached them, he stopped so abruptly that the wolves behind him almost sat on their haunches in the effort to pull up. Those that failed fell sideways under a rain of wicked snaps from him, that followed one another quick as the stutter of a machine-gun.
The pack did not stop—at least, not the flanks of it. They swept on without a pause, out and round, like flood-water round a knoll, joined at the far side, and—were still. As a maneuver, a military maneuver, swift, unexpected, faultless, and silent, it was perfect.
For as long as a man takes to light a pipe there was dead silence, broken only by the quick motor-like panting of the pack. And one hundred and twenty-nine pairs of eyes regarded the fallen trees.
Then the white wolf, all alone, with hackles up, stepped forward and leaped upon the trunk of the tree that was poised upon its fellow. He ran lightly up it till he was exactly above the hollow formed by the junction of the two trees, then stopped, looking down.