“That’s what I heard,” exclaimed the Boy at the Valley Farm. “Wolves! Imagine! I didn’t suppose they ever came into these woods.”

“It’s been an unusual winter,” his father assured him, stepping out into the snowy barn-yard. “I saw them once when I was ten years old. But I thought they had been driven away for good. I suppose the rabbits all froze, up where they come from, and they got so starved they were driven to it. They’ve certainly been chasing these deer.”

For as their eyes became accustomed to the snowy darkness, they could once more see the shadowy forms of Fleet Foot and the fawns by the hay-mow.

“It must have been those wolves that I heard ten minutes back,” said the Farmer, rubbing his unmittened hands together.

“Just see how hollow these poor things look!” exclaimed the Boy. “They must be starving. Let’s go back inside, so they won’t be afraid.”

They met the Hired Man just starting forth with his gun. “I’m going for those wolves,” he hastened to explain.

“That’s more like it,” said the Farmer.

Here they were at last, beside the hay-stack, Fleet Foot and her fawns. And as three disappointed howls arose from the woods at their back, the famished deer turned to snatch their first ravenous mouthfuls from between the bars of the crib. They paused in their banquet only long enough to stare at the Hired Man, as with snow-shoes strapped to his feet, he strode down the Old Logging Road,—Lop Ear, the Hound, at his heels.

“Who-o-o-o!” howled the three gray wolves from the blackness of the woods. The Hired Man raised his thunder-stick and fired—straight between a pair of the red eyes that gleamed at him through the night.

“Yoo-o-o-o!” screamed one of the wolves, as he fell, while the cries of the other two retreated into the forest. And Whoo Lee, the great barred owl, could have told you that they carried their tails between their legs. Their weird voices faded rapidly into the depths of the woods; for wolves travel fast on their round, furry feet, which spread out beneath them like round snow-shoes.

The Hired Man strode on down the Old Logging Road past the charred trunks which the forest fire had swept,—standing like white ghosts now in their snowy mantles,—and on nearly to Lone Lake. But never a sign of the gleaming eyes of the two remaining wolves could he see, though his ears shuddered at the weird howls that rang down the wind, and Lop Ear bristled and growled.

Fleet Foot and the starving fawns nibbled and nibbled at the hay-mow,—for the time, at least, safe and happy. But could they ever get back to the herd-yard, with those wolves still at large?

For once they were in luck. The Hired Man was not the only hunter who followed the wolves that night. Old Man Lynx, that fierce, furry fellow with tassels on his ears and claws that could rend like steel hooks, had also been driven down to the Valley by the winter’s famine. He, too, heard the howling of the wolves.

He heard the piercing scream of the wolf the Hired Man had shot, and he knew what it meant. The lynx was hungry, for the storms had lasted many days, and the rabbits and grouse hens hid away where he could not find them. On his own wide, spreading paws, therefore, he set out over the snow to find the wolf that had fallen. His heart was glad at the unexpected feast in store, and he whined hungrily under his breath.

Every now and again he had to pause to bite off the icy balls that had formed under his warm feet. But before ever the Hired Man had turned back from Lone Lake, Old Man Lynx was peering and sniffing at the wolf that lay dead.

One thing he did not know, though. No sooner had the two remaining wolves raced to Lone Lake, with their tails between their legs, and the roar of the thunder-stick in their ears, than it occurred to them that they were still ravenously hungry. And the one that had fallen would go far toward easing that terrible emptiness that drew their sides together and made them desperate. (For wolves are cannibals!)

So, back the horrid beasts came, running on their furry snow-shoes—back down the wind, which told the noses of these great wild dogs as plainly as words that Old Man Lynx was there before them.

“Who-o-o-o,” they howled wrathfully, speeding back through the burnt-wood, over whose ghost-like trunks they leapt in the darkness so fast that no Hired Man could have shot them had he tried.

Old Man Lynx raised his whiskered face and yowled an answering challenge.

“Ye-ow-w-w!” he screamed at them defiantly. Then he bent his head to snatch another mouthful of the meat he knew the wolves were on their way to claim.

“Ye-ow-w-w!” he screamed again, as the wolf cry swept nearer. This time he saw two pairs of red eyes gleaming in the darkness.

“I got here first, and I’ll make it hot for the first one that comes within reach of my claws,” he warned them, in tones they understood without words.

“We are two to your one!” they answered him.

Little did Old Man Lynx imagine that he had an ally so near. To him it was merely a case of having found a meal in the wolf the Hired Man had shot, and of having the rest of the pack demand it of him. So the giant cat took his stand, with claws outspread over the prize, his savage face tense with hate. His green eyes blazed at them through the darkness.

The cowardly wolves paused just out of reach, neither one of them quite daring to begin the attack, yet willing to fall in, should the other go first, for both were wild with hunger.

Old Man Lynx was not afraid. He meant merely to meet each wolf as he came, and fight him off with tooth and claw—or if worst came to worst, he could climb the nearest tree. For the power to climb is the one great advantage that cats have over all members of the dog tribe.

Old Man Lynx himself was lean with famine, for the great storm had made hunting all but impossible for him. Not so much as a wood-mouse had shown its tracks on the snow for days. And there had been nothing in his rocky den save the dried and frozen bones of dinners long since past.

To surrender his supper to-night might mean starvation and actual death to him. But so it did to the wolves. It was to be a fight for life!

Now a lynx’s claws are like so many little curved swords of poisoned steel,—and he had five on each foot. He could dig at a wolf’s unprotected sides with his hind legs while his fore legs were clinging to the throat in which he would try to fasten his fangs.

The gray wolves knew all this, for Old Man Lynx visited the same Canadian wilds that they had come from. But even so, in another moment they had taken the leap—together! And there was more lynx fur flying than wolf fur—as Whoo Lee, the owl overhead, could have told you.

Just in the nick of time for Old Man Lynx, the Hired Man returned. When he heard the shrill chorus of returning wolves, he had hastened back, his great snow-shoes shuffling their way down the Old Logging Road at a speed of which he had not known them capable.

He was not thinking of Fleet Foot and the fawns. But with the barn full of cattle, it would never do to leave such beasts at large in the forest. When he heard Old Man Lynx, however, the Hired Man understood just what was going on. He had not lived in the back-woods for nothing all his days. And he decided to draw a little nearer, in the hope of getting another shot or two at the great gray terrors from the North.