Through the thick drive of the snowflakes—small, hard, bitter flakes, borne on the long wind of the terrible Coppermine barrens—the man and the beast stood staring at each other, motionless. In the beast’s eyes was a heavy wonder, mixed with curiosity and dread. Never before had he seen any being like this erect slim shape, veiled and vague and dark in the whirling drift. He felt it to be dangerous, but he was loath to tear himself away from the scrutiny of it.

The man, on the other hand, had neither wonder, curiosity, nor dread in his gaze. He knew that the black and massive apparition before him was a musk-ox. His first impulse had been to snatch up his rifle and shoot, before the beast could fade off into the white confusion of the storm. But his practised eye had told him that the animal was an old bull. His necessity was not fierce enough to drive him to the eating of such flesh—tough and reeking to nausea with musk. He wanted a young cow whose meat would be tender and sweet as caribou. He was content to wait, knowing that the herd must be near, and would not leave these feeding-grounds unless frightened. At this season the black bull, there staring at him heavily through the drift, would not be solitary.

The man was a trapper, who was making his way down the river to the Hudson Bay Company’s post at the mouth. Through failure of the caribou to come his way according to their custom, his supplies had run short, and he was seeking the post in good time before the pinch of hunger should fix itself upon him. But he had had bad luck. The failure of the caribou had hit others besides himself. The wolves had suffered by it. Perhaps, in their shrewd and savage spirits, they had blamed the man for the absence of their accustomed quarry. Some weeks before his start they had craftily picked off his dogs—a reasonable and satisfying retaliation. And now the man was hauling the sledge himself.

In a moment’s lift of the storm, the man had noted a little valley, a depression in the vast wind-swept level of the barrens, lying but a couple of stone’s-throws aside from the banks of the river which was his guide. He knew that there he would find a dense growth of the stunted firs which spring up wherever they can find shelter from the wind. There he knew he would find dry stuff in plenty for his fire. There he would take covert till the storm should go down and suffer him to trail the musk-ox herd. After eying the black bull steadily for some minutes, he softly turned away, and without haste made for the valley of the little firs, dragging the laden sledge behind him.

The black bull snorted thickly and took several steps forward. The strange figure fading silently away through the drift evidently feared him. A fleeing foe was surely to be followed. But that long dark shape crawling at the stranger’s heels—that looked formidable and very mysterious. The beast stopped, shook his head, snorted again more loudly, and drew back those few paces which he had advanced. Perhaps it was just as well not to be too bold in interrogating the unknown. After a few moments of hesitation he wheeled aside, lifted his massive and shaggy head, sniffed the air, listened intently, and withdrew to rejoin the little herd, which was lying down and contentedly chewing the cud, all indifferent to the drive of the polar storm.

The black bull of the barrens, as he stood and eyed contemplatively the resting herd, showed small in stature but extraordinarily massive in build. A scant six feet in length from muzzle to root of tail, and not much over three feet high at the shoulder, he was modelled, nevertheless, on lines that for power a mammoth might have envied. His square frame was clothed with long blackish hair reaching almost to the fetlocks. His ponderous head, maned and shaggy, was armed with short crescent horns, keen-tipped and serviceable for battle. And he carried it swung low, muzzle in and front well forward, always ready for defence against the enemies of the herd.

The herd numbered some dozen or fifteen cows, armed and powerful like their mates, several younger bulls, and perhaps a dozen yearling or two-year-old calves. At one moment, as the fierce drift slackened, they would all be more or less visible—shrouded, dark forms with contemplative eyes, peacefully ruminating. A moment more and they would vanish, as the snow again closed down about them.

It was the old bull alone who seemed to be thoroughly on the alert. Hither and thither, with a certain slow vigilance, he moved through the herd. All at once he lifted his head sharply and questioned the air with dilating nostrils, while his eyes gleamed with anger and anxiety. The next instant he stamped his foot and gave a loud abrupt call, half bleat, half bellow.

Plainly it was a signal well understood. In a second the whole herd was on its feet. In another, with lightning precision, it had formed itself into a compact circle, using the watchful leader as the basic point of its formation. The calves, butted unceremoniously into the centre, hustled one upon the other, with uplifted muzzles over each other’s shoulders and mild eyes staring with startled fright. The outer rim of the circle became a fringe of sullen lowering foreheads, angry eyes and keen horns jutting formidably from snow-powdered manes of dark hair.

Not a member of the musk-ox herd, to the youngest calf, but knew very well against what enemy the old bull had so suddenly marshalled them into fighting phalanx. For some moments, however—long, tense, vigilant moments—nothing appeared. Then at last, through the driving flakes, they caught sight of several gaunt, leaping forms, gray and shadowy, which swept down upon them in silence out of the storm.

With terrible suddenness and speed they came, these leaping forms, as if they would hurl themselves blindly upon the massed herd. But the line of lowered horns never flinched or wavered, and with a short snarl from their leader the wolves swerved, just in time to escape a savage thrust from the old bull. They swerved, strung out into line, and went loping round the circle, their narrowed, greenish, merciless eyes glaring into the obstinate ones of the musk-oxen. Again and again they circled the rampart of horns, again and again they drew off and swept up furiously to the assault, hoping to find some weak point in the defences—some timorous young cow who would shrink and swerve at their assault and open a breach in the line. But there was no cow in that herd afflicted with any such suicidal folly. The snow-spotted, lowering line of heads waited unshaken, and presently the wolves—there were seven of them—bunched together a few paces from the circle and seemed to consider. Two of them sat down upon their haunches with their tongues hanging out, and eyed the rampart of horned fronts evilly, while the others stood with their heads together, or prowled restlessly back and forth. They might, indeed, with the vast leaping power of their long legs and muscular haunches, have sprung clear over the line of defence, and gained in two seconds the helpless calves in the centre; but they knew what that would mean. The herd would turn in upon them in a blind, uncalculating fury and trample them underfoot. For the moment, therefore, they hung wavering in irresolution, looking for a sign from the leader of the pack.

In the meantime the man had found his valley hollow and the shelter of the expected colony of dwarf firs. Here the snow lay soft and undrifted. In a recess of the fir-thicket he trod it down with his snowshoes, and made haste to build himself a little fire of dead sticks. Above his head, above the shrouded fir-tops, above the rim of the hollow, the storm drove by unabated; but the snowflakes that escaped from the tumult to filter down into this retreat were too light and fine and dry to interfere with the fire. In two or three minutes the flames were crackling up clear and free, with little spittings and fine hissings where the flakes fell at their thin edges.

Having collected a pile of dry sticks within easy reach, the man stretched a couple of stitched caribou hides on poles to form a sloping roof over his head, cooked himself a hasty stew of pemmican and biscuit, made a hearty meal, and squatted before the fire with his back against his sledge, to smoke and wait. He knew how to wait, like an Indian, when there was anything to be gained by it, and his heart, weary of pemmican, was set on fresh meat.

There was no sign of the storm breaking; there was no use hunting in the storm. There was nothing to fear, for it was now three weeks since he had seen sign of the wolves which had eaten his dogs, and he knew that they had ranged off on the trail of the vanished caribou. There was nothing to do. He was warm and filled, and free from care. Some hundred miles or so away there was a post and human companionship, to which he looked forward with unhurried content. In due time he would arrive there and find it, as always before, unchanged, like all else in that land of inevitable recurrence. Meanwhile—this afternoon, perhaps, or to-morrow—he would shoot a young musk-ox cow. He drew his furs well about him and dozed off to sleep, knowing that the moment the fire began to get dangerously low an unfailing instinct would bid him awake to tend it.

While he slept, the storm drove unrelenting over the place of his retreat, and kept heaping the thin dry snow in fringes and wreaths upon the shaggy, lowering fronts of the musk-ox phalanx. From time to time, a massive head would shake off the burden and emerge black and menacing. And always, with unwavering vigilance, the army of angry eyes and short sharp horns confronted the group of discontented wolves.

Now, as it chanced, the trapper was wrong in his assumption as to the wolves. The truth—which would have made a great difference in his calculations had he known it—was that they had been cautiously trailing him ever since he left his hut. But they knew something of man, those wolves, and they feared him. They were not yet quite mad with hunger, so they had not yet quite plucked up courage to reveal themselves to him, still less to commit themselves to an open attack. They dreaded his eye, they dreaded his sharp, authoritative voice. They dreaded the strange, menacing smell of him. They dreaded his mysterious power of striking invisibly from very far off. Had they had any choice, they would far rather have been running down the caribou than trailing this solitary trapper. But the craving belly is a hard master, and they had no choice but to hasten wherever it scourged them on. Moreover, they knew along the trail of the man there were liable to be pickings, for man, a fastidious feeder, never eats all he kills.

When at last the trail of the man had led them into that of the musk-oxen, the pack had been glad. So much the more, therefore, their disappointed rage, when they found the herd ready for their attack, and too strong, in point of numbers and experienced leadership, to be stampeded. Seeing the prey so near, with each moment of their discomfiture their hunger and their fury grew.

Suddenly, without visible sign or warning, it seemed to boil over all at once. The whole pack sprang together, swift as the snap of a whip, into a compact mass, and hurled itself straight upon the circle of lowered horns. The charge looked irresistible. It seemed that the most dauntless must cringe and shrink before it.

But the point attacked was a strong one in the array. It was held by the wise old bull. To either side of him the shaggy black heads breathed hard or snorted loudly, but not a horn wavered. And in the face of this steadfastness the attack was not driven home. In the very last fraction of a second the leader swerved; the pack swept swiftly aside, but it was very close. As the hindmost wolf went by, the old bull lunged forward, head and shoulders beyond the circle, with a savage twist of his short, polished horns. There was a startled yelp. He had just managed to catch his foe a rending prod in the thick of the haunch. The wolf never paused—he was under the iron discipline of the pack,—but as he ran he left a scarlet trail along the snow behind him.

To the slow amazement of the herd, their enemies now, in the next instant, had vanished through the thin whirl of the drift. Heavy heads, thrust far out from the phalanx, turned to stare after them. There was nothing to be seen but the endless, sheeted procession of the snow. There was nothing to be heard but the muffled rush of the wind and their own snortings and tramplings. For a long time, however, they kept their array unbroken, fearing a trick on the part of their adversaries. Then at last the old bull, after sniffing the wind in all directions with uplifted muzzle, stepped forth from the ranks. Immediately the circle dissolved. There was a moment of whirling and grunting, of butting at stupid calves or reorganizing the array, then, at a swift walk, the whole herd moved off toward the northeast, where they knew of a region of low huddled hills which would give them the kind of shelter that they loved.

In the meantime the pack, maddened by failure and ravenous from the view of food denied, had resumed the trail of the man. They were different beings now from the wary skulkers who had been following him from afar. Silent and swift, their eyes flaming coldly and their thin lips wrinkled back from long white fangs, they swept over the brink and down into the windless hollow of the stunted firs.

The man, sleeping in his furs by the little fire, had a bad dream. With a struggle and a yell he awoke from it, to find himself half erect, upon one knee, battling frantically for his life. One great hairy form he had clutched by the throat with both hands, as its fangs snapped within an inch of his face, and its huge hot breath daunted him with a sense that the end of things had come. With a monstrous effort he hurled it off, but in the same moment he was borne down from behind. It seemed to him that a wave of furred, fighting bodies, enormous and irresistible, went over him, blotting out everything, even to the desire of life. He was but half conscious of the fangs that sank into his flesh, strangely without pain. He was but half conscious of struggling—the mere instinctive struggle of his strong muscles, and already condemned as futile by his aloof and scornful spirit. Then nothing but a knot of great gray wolves, tussling and snarling over something on the snow.

* * * * * * * *

After everything on the sledge had been torn open and investigated, and scattered over the blood-stained snow, the wolves drew off to a little distance from the fire, which they hated and dreaded. It was a victory which would make that pack for the future tenfold more dangerous. They had dared and vanquished man. But what was one man and a little bag of dry pemmican to such hunger as theirs? All at once, as if moved simultaneously by one impulse, they gathered, sped up out of the firs into the wind, and swept away through the storm on the trail of the musk-ox herd.

The herd, though travelling fast, had not gone far. On a sudden, as if at a premonition of peril, the old bull halted with a loud snort. Neither smell nor sound of his enemies had reached him, but he took alarm, and gave the signal to form phalanx for defence, at the same time galloping around the flank of the herd to close up and strengthen the rear. The evolution was prompt and swift. But before it was quite accomplished, up from the white obscurity of the storm, in silence, came the leaping wolves.

Straight into the gap in the rear of the herd they hurled themselves, slashing on every side with the aim of spreading a panic. A young bull, just in the act of whirling furiously to confront the attack, was caught full on the flank, and went down coughing, his throat torn clean out. A young cow, with one wolf snapping at her side, but failing to gain a vital spot, and another on her back, biting for her neck through the matted mane, went mad with terror, and charged straight in among the calves at the centre of the herd, making a way for the whole pack.

In a second several of the calves, bawling frantically, were pulled down. The wolves, mad with blood and their late triumph over the man, were in a riot of slaughter. The herd was cleft and rent asunder to the heart. The victory seemed overwhelming.