Gradually, as the days went by, the impression faded. There was a more important thing that haunted his mind continually. Kiopo did not come back.
The weather grew colder. There was much business in the upper sky. By day it took the form of a great arrow-head of wings, driving from the north; by night it was a voice. And as the harsh honking cry fell from the roof of the world, Dusty Star knew that the vast waters of the North were giving up their geese.
And when the last arrow-head had winged, and the last honk fallen, the night-breeze that came sighing along a thousand miles of prairie was barbed with early frost.
One night, the strange restlessness that was in the hearts of the coyotes, making the prairie ridges clamorous with their choruses, disturbed Dusty Star so strongly that it brought him trouble in his dreams. He woke with a sense that something was calling him. As he listened, he recognized the familiar and yet always uncanny way in which the coyotes arrange their evening chorus—the short barks of the opening bars, which grow louder and more acute, till they change to the final howl. They were singing to-night as coyotes had chorused it a million times before. Yet to-night there seemed to Dusty Star to be something special in the cry, as if it were an invitation to him from the prairie folk to go out and do something, or be something, which he had neither done nor been before. Without waiting to question what the thing might be, he got up softly, and crept out of the tepee. Outside, the camp lay very still. Most of the inhabitants had gone to bed. Only here and there a lodge glimmered with the light of an inside fire which had not yet died down.
Dusty Star looked carefully round on every side to see if anything moved, and then glided away into the darkness.
The coyote calls had died away now, but he fancied that they had come from the direction of Look-out Bluff. The bluff was known to be a bad place. The Thunder-bird (so they said) visited it in the moon when the grass is green, and darkened it with his wings. Old Ahitopee, moreover, who had gone upon the Wolf Trail many moons ago, was reported to make evil medicine there, and to hob-a-nob with the prairie wolves. Nevertheless, Dusty Star took his courage in both hands, and went towards the bluff.
He was about half-way there, when he caught, far out upon the prairies, a faint, but carrying note. He stopped, listening intently, but it did not come again. For all that, Dusty Star was certain that he had heard the hunting call of a wolf.
He went on. Overhead, in the black sky, the stars glittered like arrow-heads of white fire. But, under his moccasins, the prairie seemed blacker than the sky. It was dead, dark, motionless. Yet the darkness seemed to have movement in it, as of a furtive travelling which you could not see. Things walked!
At the foot of the bluff, Dusty Star stopped. If old Ahitopee were making medicine, it might be as well to avoid that side of the bluff. Those who went upon the Wolf Trail did not like to be disturbed. He listened very carefully. The huge quiet of the prairies seemed filled with thread-like sounds as from that stealthy travelling which you could not see. Only the medicine of Ahitopee was not audible. It seemed safe to go on.
But now he had the fancy that, towards the north, a shadowy shape kept pace with him as he advanced. When he stopped there was no shadow, but when he moved, it was there.