But the man did not move. He stood like a statue till
the danger was past, when he yielded to a fit of trembling and sank
down into the wet moss.
He pulled himself together and went on, afraid now in a new way.
It was not the fear that he should die passively from lack of food,
but that he should be destroyed violently before starvation had
exhausted the last particle of the endeavor in him that made toward
surviving. There were the wolves. Back and forth across the
desolation drifted their howls, weaving the very air into a fabric
of menace that was so tangible that he found himself, arms in the
air, pressing it back from him as it might be the walls of a wind-
blown tent.
Now and again the wolves, in packs of two and three, crossed his
path. But they sheered clear of him. They were not in sufficient
numbers, and besides they were hunting the caribou, which did not
battle, while this strange creature that walked erect might scratch
and bite.
In the late afternoon he came upon scattered bones where the wolves
had made a kill. The debris had been a caribou calf an hour
before, squawking and running and very much alive.
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