THE LAIR

 The two days the she-wolf and One Eye hung about the Indian camp.He was worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lure his mate and she was loath to depart.But when,one morning,the air was rent with the report of a rifle close at hand,and a bullet smashed atainst a tree trunk several inches from One Eye's head,they hesitated no more,but went off on a long,swinging lope that put quick miles between them and the danger.

  They did not far-a couple of days' journey.The she-wolf's need to find the thing for which she searched had now become imperatinve.She was getting very heavy,and could run but slowl.Once,in the pursuit of a rabbit,which she ordinarily would have caught with ease,she gave over and lay down and rested.One Eye came to her;but when he touched her neck gently with his muzzled she snapped at him with such quick fierceness that he tumbled over backward and cut a ridiculois figure in his effort to escape her teeth.Her temper was now shorter than ever;but he had become nore patient than ever and more solicitous.

  And the she found the thing for which she sought.It was a few miles up a small stream that in the summer time flowed into the Mackenzie, but that then was frozien over and frozen down to its rocky bottom-a dad stram of solid white from source to mouth.The she-wolf was trotting wearil along,her mate well in advance,when she came upon the overhanging,high clay-bank.She turned aside and trotted over to it.The wear and tear of spring storms and melting snows had underwashed the band and in one place had made a small cave out of a narrow fissure.

    She pussed at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over carefully.Then,on one side and the other,she ran along the base of the wall to where its abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined landscape.Returning to the cave,she entered itsnarrow mouth.For a short three feet she was compelled to crouch,then the walls widened and rose higher in a little round chamber nearly six feet in diameter.The roof barely cleared her head.It was dry and cosy.She inspected it with painstaking care,while One Eye,who had returned,stood in the entrancee and patiently watched her.She dropped her head,with her nose to the ground and directed toward a point near to her closely bunched feet,and around theis point she circled several times;then,with a tire sighthat was almost a grunt,she curled her body in,relaxed her legs,and dropped down,her head toward the entrance.One Eye,with pointed,interested ears,laughed at her,and beyond,outlined against the white light,she could see the brush of his tail waving good-maturedly.Her own ears,with a snuggling movement,laid their sharp points backward and down against the head for a moment,while her mouth opened and her tongue lolled peaceably out,and in this way she expressed that she was pleased and  satisfied.

    One Eye was hungry.Though he lay down in the entrance and slept,his sleep was fitful.Hkept awaking and cocking his ears at the bright world without,where the april sun was blazing across the snow.When he dozed,upon his ears would steal the faint whispers of hidden trickles of running water,and he would rouse and listen intently.The sun had come back,and all the avakening Northland world was calling to him.Life was stirring.The feel of spring was in the air,the feelof growing life under the snow ,of sap ascedning ing the trees,of buds bursting the shackles of the frost.

    He cast anxious glances at his mate,but she showed no desire to get up.He looked outside,and half a dozen snowbirds fluttered across his field of vision.He started to get up,then looked back to his mate again,and settled down and dozed.Ashrill and minute singing stole upon his hearing.Once,and  twice,he sleepily brushed his nose with his paw.Then he woke up.There,buzzing in the air at the tip of his nose,was a lone mosquito.It was a full-grown mosquito,one the had lain frozen in a dry log all winter and that had now been thawed ort by the sun.He could resist the call of the world no longe.Besides,he was hungry.

    He crawled over to his mate and tred to persuade her to get up.But she only snarled at him,and he walked out alone into the bright sunshine to find the snow-surface soft underfoot and the travelling difficult.He went up the frozen bed of the stream,where the snow,shaded by the trees,was yet hard and crystalline.He was gone eight hours,and he came back through the darkness hungrier than when he had started.He had fund game,but he had not caught it.He had broked through the melting snow-crust,and wallowed,while the snowshoe rabbits had skimmed along on top lightly as ever.

    He paused at the nouth of the cave with a sudded shock of suspicion.Faint,strange sounds came from within.They wre sounds not made by his mate,and yet they wererenotely familiar.He bellied cautiously inside and was met by a warning snarl from the she-wolf.This he received without perturbation,though he obeyed it by keeping his distance;but he remained interested in the other sounds-faint,muffled sobbings and slubberings.

    His mate warned him irritably away,and he curled up and  slept in the entrance.When morning came and a dim light pervade the lair,he again sought after the source of the renotely familiar sounds.There was a new note in his mate'swarning snarl.It was a jealous note ,and he was very careful in keeping a respectful distance.Nevertheless,he made out,sheltering between her legs against the length of her body,five strange little bundles of life,very feeble,very helpless,making tiny whimpering noised,with eyes that ded not open to the light.He was surprised.It was not the first time in his long and successful life that this thing had happened.It had happened many timeds,yet each time it was as fresh a surprise as ever to him.

    His mate looked at him anxiously.Every little while she emitted a low growl,and at times,when it seemed to her he approached too near,the growl shot up in her throat to a sharp snarl.Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening;but in her instinct,which was the experience of all the mother os wolves,there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.It manifested itself as a fear strong within her,that made her prevent One Eye from more closely inspecting the cubs he had fathered.

    But there was no danger.Old One Eye was feeling the urge of an impulse,that was,in turn,an instinct that had come down to him from all tha fathers of wolves.He did not question it,nor puzzle over it.It was there,in the fibre of his being;and it was the most natural thing in the world that he should obey it by rurning his back on his new-born family and by trotting out and awayon the meat-trail whereby he lived.

    Five or six miles from the lair,the stream divided,its forks going off among the mountains at a right angle.Here,leading up the left fork,he came upon a fresh track.He smelled it and found it so recent that he crouched swiftly,and looked in the direction in which it disappeared.Then he turned deliberately and took the right fork.The footprint was much larger than the one his own feet made,and he knew that in te wake of such a trail there was little meat for him.

    Half a mile up the right fork,his quick ears caught the sound of gnawing teeth.He stalked the quarry and found it to be a porcupine,standing upright against a tree and trying his teeth on the bark.One Eye approached carefully but hopelessly.He knew the breed,though he had never met it so far north before;and never in his long life had porcupine serve him for a meal.But he had long since learned that there was such a thing as Chance,or Opportunity,and he continued to draw near.There was neverany tilling what might happen,for with lve things events were somehow always happening differently.

    The porcupine rolled itself into a ball,radiating long,sharp needles in all directions that defied attack.In his youth OneEye had once sniffed too near a similar,apparently inert ball of quills and had the tail flick out suddenly is his face.One quill he had carride away is his muzzle,where it had remained for weeks,a rankling flame,until it finally worked out.So he lay down,in a comfortable crouching position,his nose fully a foot away,and out of the line of the tail.Thus he waited,keeping perfectly quiet.There was no telling.Something might happen.The porcupine might unroll.Theremight be opportunity for a deft and ripping thrust of paw into the tende,unguarded belly.

    But at the end of half an hour he arose,growled wrathfrlly at the motionless ball,and trotted on.He had waited too often and futilely in the past for porcupines to unroll,to waste any more time.He continued up the right fork.The day wore along,and nothing rewarded his hunt.

    The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon him.He must find meat.In the agrernoon he blundered upon a ptarmigan.He came out of a thicket and found himself face to face with the slow-witted bird.It was sitting on a log,not a foot beyond the end of his nose.each saw the other.The bird made a startled rise,but he struck it with his paw,and smashed it down to earth,then pounced upon it,and caught it in his teeth as it scuttled across the snow trying to rise in the air again.As his teeth crunched through thetender flesh and fragile bones,he began naturally to eat.Then he remembered ,and  ,turning   on the back-track,started for home,carrying the ptarmigan in his mouth.

    A mile above the forks,running velvet-footed as was his custom,a gliding shasow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the trail,he came upon later imprints of the largetracks he had discovered in the early morning.As the trackled his way,he followed,prepared to meet the maker of it at every turn of the stream.

    He slid his head around a corner of rock,where began an unusually large bend in the stream,and his quick eyes made out something that sent him crouching swiftly down.It was the maker of the track,a large female lynx.She was crouching as he had crouched once that day,in front of her the tightrolled ball of quills.If he had been a gliding shasow before,he now became the ghost of such a shadow,as he crept and circled around,and came up well to leeward of the silent,motionless pair.

    He lay down in the snow,depositing the ptarmigan beside him,and with eyes peering through the needles of a lowgrowing spruce he watched the play of life before him-the waiting lynz and the waiting porcupine,each intent of life;and,such was the curiousness of the game,the way of life for one lay in the eating of the other,and the way of life for the other lay in being noteaten.While old One Eye,the wolf,crouching in the covert,played his part,too,in the game,waiting for some strange freak of Chance,that might help him on the meat-trail which was his way of life.

    Half an hour passed,an hour;and nothing happened.The ball of quills might have been a stone for all it moved;the lynx might have been frozen to marble;and old One Eyemight have been dead/Yet all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful,and scarcely ever would it coe to them to be more alive than they were then in their seeming petrifaction.

    One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness.Something washappening.The porcupine had at last decide that its enemy had gone away.Slowly,cautiously,it was unrolling its ball of impregnable rmor.It was agitated by no tremor of anticipation.Slowly,slowly,the bristling ball sudden moistness in his mouth and a drooling of saliva,involuntary,excited by the living meat that was spreading itself like a repast before him.

    Mot quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered its enemy.In that instant the lynx strck.The blow was like a flas of light.The paw,with rigid claws curving like talons,shot under the tender belly and came backwith a swift ripping movement.Had the porcupine been entirely unrolled,or had it not discovered its enemy a fraction of a second before the blow was struck,the pqw would have escaped unscatred;but a side-flick of the tail sank sharp quills into it as it was withdrawn.

    Everything had happened at once,-the blow,the counterblow,the squeal of agony from the porcupine,the big cat's squall of sudden hurt and astonishment.One Eye half arose in his excitement,his ears up,his tail straight out and quivering behind him.The lynx's bad temper got the best of her.She sprangsavagely at the thing that had hurt her.But the porcupine,squealing and trunting,with disrupted anatomy trying feebly to roll up into its ball-protection,flicked out its tail again,and again the big car squalled with hurt and astonishment.Then she fell to backing away and sneezing,her nose bristling with quills like a monstrous pin-cushion.She brushed her nose with her paws,trying to dislodge the fiery darts,thrust it into the snow,and rubbed it a gainst twigsand branches,all the tiome leaping about,ahead,sidewise,up and down,in a frenzy of pain and fright.

    She sneezed continually,and her stub of a tail was doing its best toward lashing about by giving quick,violent jerks.She quit her antics,and quieted down for a long minute.One Eye watched.And even he could not repress a start and an involuntary bristling of hair along his back when she suddenlyleaped,without warning,straight up in the air,at the same time emitting a long and most terrible squall.Then she sprang away,up the trail,squalling with every leap she made.

    It was not until her rachet hadfaded away in the distance and died out that One Eye ventured forth.He walked as delicately as though all the snow were carpeted with porcupine quills,erect and ready to pierce the soft pads of his feet.The porcupine met his approach with a furious squealing and a clashing of its long teeth.It had managed to roll up in a ball a clashing of its long teeth.It had managed to roll up in a ball again,but it was not quite the old compact ball;its muscles were too much torn for that.It had been ripped almost in half,and was still bleeding profusely.

    One Eye scooped out mouthfuls ofthe blood-soaked snow,and chewed and tasted and swallowed.This served as a relish,and his hunger increased mightily;but he was too old in the world to forget his caution.He waited.He lay down and waited,while the porcupine grated its teeth and uttered grunts and sobs and occasional sharp little squeals.In a little while,One Eye noticed that the quills were drooping and that a great quivering had set up.The quivering came to an end suddenly.There was a final defiant clash of the long teeth.Then all the quills drooped quite down,and the body relaxed and moved no more.

    With a nervous,shrinking pqw,One Eye stretched out the porcupine to its full length and turned it over on its back.Nothing had happened.It was wurely dead.He studied it intently for a moment,then took a careful grip with his teethand started off down the stream,partly carrying,pattly dragging the porcupine,with dead truned to the side so as to avoid stepping on the prickly mass.He recollected something,dropped the burden,and trotted back to where he had left the ptarmigan.He ded not hesitate a moment.He knew clearly what was to be done,and this he ded by promptly eating the ptarmigan.Then he returned and took up his burden.

    When he dragged the result of his day's hunt into the cave,the she-wolf inspected it,turned her muzzle to him,and lightly licked him on the neck.But the next instant she was warning him away from the cubs with a snarl that was less harsh than usual and that was more apologetic than menacing.Her instinctive fear of the father of her progeny was toning down.He was behaving as a wolf father shoud,and manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young lives hse had brought into the world.