After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come to an understanding.The days passed by, and they kept together, hunting their meat and killing and eating it in common.After a time the she-wolf began to grow restless.She seemed to be searching for something that she could not find.The hollows under fallen trees seemed to attract her, and she spent much time nosing about among the larger snow-piled crevices in the rocks and in the caves of overhanging banks.Old One Eye was not interested at all, but he followed her good-naturedly in her quest, and when her investigations in particular places were unusually protracted, he would lie down and wait until she was ready to go on.
They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country until they regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly went, leaving it often to hunt game along the small streams that entered it, but always returning to it again.Sometimes they chanced upon other wolves, usually in pairs; but there was no friendliness of intercourse displayed on either side, no gladness at meeting, no desire to return to the pack-formation.
Several times they encountered solitary wolves.These were always males, and they were pressingly insistent on joining with One Eye and his mate.
This he resented, and when she stood shoulder to shoulder with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the aspiring solitary ones would back off, turn tail, and continue on their lonely way.
One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye suddenly halted.His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his nostrils dilated as he scented the air.One foot also he held up, after the manner of a dog.He was not satisfied, and he continued to smell the air, striving to understand the message borne upon it to him.One careless sniff had satisfied his mate, and she trotted on to reassure him.Though he followed her, he was still dubious, and he could not forbear an occasional halt in order more carefully to study the warning.
She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the midst of the trees.For some time she stood alone.Then One Eye, creeping and crawling, every sense on the alert, every hair radiating infinite suspicion, joined her.They stood side by side, watching and listening and smelling.
To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the guttural cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and once the shrill and plaintive cry of a child.With the exception of the huge bulks of the skin lodges, little could be seen save the flames of the fire, broken by the movements of intervening bodies, and the smoke rising slowly on the quiet air.But to their nostrils came the myriad smells of an Indian camp, carrying a story that was largely incomprehensible to One Eye, but every detail of which the she-wolf knew.
She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an increasing delight.But old One Eye was doubtful.He betrayed his apprehension, and started tentatively to go.She turned and touched his neck with her muzzle in a reassuring way, then regarded the camp again.A new wistfulness was in her face, but it was not the wistfulness of hunger.She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.
One Eye moved impatiently beside her; her unrest came back upon her, and she knew again her pressing need to find the thing for which she searched.
She turned and trotted back into the forest, to the great relief of One Eye, who trotted a little to the fore until they were well within the shelter of the trees.
