KAZAN

BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

Kazan, the quarter-strain wolf-dog, lay at the end of a fine steel chain, watching little Professor McGill mixing a pail of tallow and bran. A dozen yards from him lay a big Dane, his huge jaws drooling in anticipation of the unusual feast which McGill was preparing. The Dane showed signs of pleasure when McGill approached him with a quart of the mixture, and as he gulped it down the little man with the cold blue eyes and the gray-blond hair stroked his back without fear. But his attitude was different when he turned to Kazan. His movements were filled with caution, and yet his eyes and his lips were smiling, and he gave the wolf-dog no evidence of his fear, if it could be called fear.

The little professor was up in the north country for the Smithsonian Institution and had spent a third of his life among dogs. He loved them, and understood them. He had written a number of magazine articles on dog intellect which had attracted wide attention among naturalists. It was largely because he loved dogs, and understood them more than most men, that he had bought Kazan and the big Dane on a night when Sandy McTrigger and his partner had tried to get them to fight to the death in a Red Gold City saloon. The refusal of the two splendid beasts to kill each other for the pleasure of the three hundred men who had assembled to witness the fight delighted the professor. He had already planned a paper on the incident.

Sandy had told McGill the story of Kazan’s capture, and of his wild mate, Gray Wolf, and the professor had asked him a thousand questions. But each day Kazan puzzled him more. No amount of kindness on his part could bring a responsive gleam in Kazan’s eyes. Not once did Kazan signify a willingness to become friends. And yet he did not snarl at McGill, or snap at his hands when they came within reach. Quite frequently Sandy McTrigger came over to the little cabin where McGill was staying, and three times Kazan leaped at the end of his chain to get at him, and the wolf-dog’s white fangs gleamed as long as Sandy was in sight. Alone with McGill he became quiet.

Something told Kazan that McGill had come as a friend that night when he and the big Dane stood shoulder to shoulder in the cage that had been built for a slaughter pen. Away down in his brute heart he held McGill apart from other men. He had no desire to harm him. He tolerated him, but showed none of the growing affection of the huge Dane. It was this fact that puzzled McGill. He had never before known a dog that he could not make love him.

Today he placed the tallow and bran before Kazan, and the smile in his face gave way to a look of perplexity. Kazan’s lips had drawn suddenly back. A fierce snarl rolled deep in his throat. The hair along his spine stood up. His muscles twitched. Instinctively the professor turned. Sandy McTrigger had come up quietly behind him. His brutal face wore a grin as he looked at Kazan.

“It’s a fool job—tryin’ to make friends with him,” he said. Then he added, with a sudden interested gleam in his eyes, “When you startin’?”

“With the first frost,” replied McGill. “It ought to come soon. I’m going to join Sergeant Conroy and his party at Fond du Lac by the first of October.”

“And you’re going up to Fond du Lac—alone?” queried Sandy. “Why don’t you take a man?”

The little professor laughed softly.

“Why?” he asked. “I’ve been through the Athabasca waterways a dozen times, and know the trail as well as I know Broadway. Besides, I like to be alone. And the work isn’t too hard, with the currents all flowing to the north and east.”

Sandy was looking at the Dane, with his back to McGill. An exultant gleam shot for an instant into his eyes.

“You’re taking the dogs?”

“Yes.”

Sandy lighted his pipe, and spoke like one strangely curious.

“Must cost a heap to take these trips o’ yourn, don’t it?”

“My last cost about seven thousand dollars. This will cost five,” said McGill.

“Gawd!” breathed Sandy. “An’ you carry all that along with you! Ain’t you afraid—something might happen——”

The little professor was looking the other way now. The carelessness in his face and manner changed. His blue eyes grew a shade darker. A hard smile which Sandy did not see hovered about his lips for an instant. Then he turned, laughing.

“I’m a very light sleeper,” he said. “A footstep at night rouses me. Even a man’s breathing awakens me, when I make up my mind that I must be on guard. And, besides,”—he drew from his pocket a blue-steel automatic pistol,—”I know how to use this.” He pointed to a knot in the wall of the cabin. “Observe,” he said. Five times he fired, at twenty paces, and when Sandy went up to look at the knot he gave a gasp. There was one jagged hole where the knot had been.

“Pretty good,” he grinned; “most men couldn’t do better’n that with a rifle.”

When Sandy left, McGill followed him with a suspicious gleam in his eyes, and a curious smile on his lips. Then he turned to Kazan.

“Guess you’ve got him figgered out about right, old man,” he laughed softly. “I don’t blame you very much for wanting to get him by the throat. Perhaps——”

He shoved his hands deep in his pockets, and went into the cabin. Kazan dropped his head between his paws, and lay still, with wide-open eyes. It was early in September, and each night brought now the first chill breaths of autumn. Kazan watched the last glow of the sun as it faded out of the southern skies. Darkness always followed swiftly after that, and with darkness came more fiercely his wild longing for freedom. For Kazan was remembering.

Ever since that terrible day when the brute prospector, Sandy McTrigger, had first beaten him sick and then chained him in the wake of his canoe till every splendid muscle in his bruised body seemed bursting with pain and he was choked with water, Kazan had never for one minute ceased to remember and hate and mourn. He hated Sandy McTrigger with all the hatred of a dog and a wolf, and he mourned for his blind mate, Gray Wolf, with as much intensity as he hated. But with all the longing and sorrow in him he could not know how much more awful their separation was for his faithful mate.

Never had the terror and loneliness of blindness fallen upon Gray Wolf as in the days that followed Kazan’s capture. For hours after the shot, she had crouched in the bush back from the river, waiting for him to come to her. She had faith that he would come, as he had come a thousand times before, and she lay close on her belly, sniffing the air, and whining when it brought no scent of her mate. Day and night were alike an endless chaos of darkness to her now, but she knew when the sun went down. She sensed the first deepening shadows of evening, and she knew that the stars were out, and that the river lay in moonlight. It was a night to roam, and after a time she had moved restlessly about in a small circle on the plain, and sent out her first inquiring call for Kazan.

Up from the river came the pungent odor of smoke, and instinctively she knew that it was this smoke, and the nearness of men, that was keeping Kazan from her. But she went no nearer than that, first circle made by her padded feet. Blindness had taught her to wait. Since the day of the battle on the Sun Rock, when the lynx had destroyed her eyes, Kazan had never failed her. Three times she called for him in the early night. Then she made herself a nest under a Banksian shrub, and waited until dawn.

Just as she knew when night blotted out the last glow of the sun, so without seeing she knew when day came. Not until she felt the warmth of the sun on her back did her anxiety overcome her caution. Slowly she moved toward the river, sniffing the air, and whining. There was no longer the smell of smoke in the air, and she could not catch the scent of man. She followed her own trail back to the sand bar, and in the fringe of thick bush overhanging the white shore of the stream she stopped and listened.

After a little she scrambled down and went straight to the spot where she and Kazan were drinking when Sandy’s shot came. And there her nose struck the sand still wet and thick with Kazan’s blood. She sniffed the trail of his body to the edge of the stream, where Sandy had dragged him to the canoe. And then she came upon one of the two clubs that Sandy had used to beat wounded Kazan into submission. It was covered with blood and hair, and all at once Gray Wolf lay back on her haunches and turned her blind face to the sky, and there rose from her throat a cry for Kazan that drifted for miles on the wings of the south wind. Never had Gray Wolf given quite that cry before. It was not the “call” that comes with moonlit nights, and neither was it the hunt cry, nor the she-wolf’s yearning for matehood. It carried with it the lament of death. And after that one cry Gray Wolf slunk back to the fringe of bush over the river, and lay with her face turned to the stream.

A strange terror fell upon her. She had grown accustomed to darkness, but never before had she been alone in that darkness. Always there had been the guardianship of Kazan’s presence. She heard the clucking sound of a spruce hen in the bush a few yards away, and now that sound came to her as if from out of another world. A ground-mouse rustled through the grass close to her forepaws, and she snapped at it—and closed her teeth on a rock. The muscles of her shoulders twitched tremulously, and she shivered as if stricken by intense cold. She was terrified by the darkness that shut out the world from her, and she pawed at her closed eyes, as if she might open them to light.

Early in the afternoon, she wandered back on the plain. It was different. It frightened her, and soon she returned to the beach, and snuggled down under the tree where Kazan had lain. She was not so frightened here. The smell of Kazan was strong about her. For an hour she lay motionless, with her head resting on the club clotted with his hair and blood. Night found her still there. And when the moon and stars came out she crawled back into the pit in the white sand that Kazan’s body had made under the tree.

With dawn she went down to the edge of the stream to drink. She could not see that the day was almost as dark as night, and that the gray-black sky was a chaos of slumbering storm. But she could smell the presence of it in the thick air, and could feel the forked flashes of lightning that rolled up with the dense pall from the south and west. The distant rumbling of thunder grew louder, and she huddled herself again under the tree. For hours the storm crashed over her, and the rain fell in a deluge. When it had finished, she slunk out from her shelter, like a thing beaten. Vainly she sought for one last scent of Kazan. The club was washed clean. Again the sand was white where Kazan’s blood had reddened it. Even under the tree there was no sign of him left.

Until now only the terror of being alone in the pit of darkness that enveloped her had oppressed Gray Wolf. With afternoon came hunger. It was this hunger that drew her from the sandbar, and she wandered back into the plain. A dozen times she scented game, and each time it evaded her. Even a ground-mouse that she cornered under a root escaped her fangs.

That night she slept again where Kazan had lain, and three times she called for him without answer. But still through the day that followed, and the day that followed that, blind Gray Wolf clung to the narrow rim of white sand. On the fourth day her hunger reached a point where she gnawed the bark from willow bushes. It was on this day that she made a discovery. She was drinking, when her sensitive nose touched something in the water’s edge that was smooth, and bore a faint fleshy odor. It was one of the big northern river clams. She pawed it ashore, sniffing at the hard shell. Then she crunched it between her teeth. She had never tasted sweeter meat than that which she found inside, and she began hunting for other clams. She found many of them, and ate until she was no longer hungry.

For three days more Gray Wolf remained on the bar. And then, one night the Call came to her. It set her quivering with a strange, new excitement—something that may have been a new hope—and in the moonlight she trotted nervously up and down the shining strip of sand, facing now the north, and now the south, and then the east and the west—her head flung up, listening, as if in the soft wind of the night she was trying to locate the whispering lure of a wonderful voice. And whatever it was that came to her, came from out of the south and east. Off there—across the barren, far beyond the outer edge of the northern timber line—was home. And off there, in her brute way, she reasoned that she must find Kazan.

The Call did not come from their old windfall home in the swamp. It came from beyond that, and in a flashing vision there rose through her blindness a picture of the towering Sun Rock, of the winding trail that led to it, and the cabin on the plain where the man and the woman and the baby lived. It was there that blindness had come to her. It was there that day had ended, and eternal night had begun. And it was there that she had given birth to her first-born. Nature had registered these things so that they could never be wiped out of her memory.

And to that Call she responded, leaving the river and its food behind her—straight out into the face of darkness and starvation, no longer fearing death or the emptiness of the world she could not see; for ahead of her, two hundred miles away, she could see the Sun Rock, the winding trail, the nest of her first-born between the two big rocks—and Kazan!

And sixty miles farther north Kazan, night after night, gnawed at his steel chain. Night after night he had watched the stars, and the moon, and had listened for Gray Wolf’s call, while the big Dane lay sleeping. Tonight it was colder than usual, and the keen tang of the wind that came fresh from the west stirred him strangely. It set his blood afire with what the Indians call the Frost Hunger. Lethargic summer was gone and the sharp-winded days and nights of hunting were at hand. He wanted to leap out into freedom and run until he was exhausted, with Gray Wolf at his side. He knew that Gray Wolf was off there—where the stars hung low in the clear sky—and that she was waiting.

All that night he was restless—more restless than he had been at any time before. Once, in the far distance, he heard a cry that he thought was the cry of Gray Wolf, and his answer roused McGill from deep sleep. It was dawn, and the little professor dressed himself and came out of the cabin. With satisfaction he noted the exhilarating snap in the air. He wet his fingers and held them above his head, chuckling when he found the wind had swung into the north. He went to Kazan, and talked to him. Among other things he said: “This’ll put the black flies to sleep, Kazan. A day or two more of it and we’ll start.”

Five days later McGill led first the Dane, and then Kazan, to a packed canoe. Sandy McTrigger saw them off, and Kazan watched for a chance to leap at him. Sandy kept his distance, and McGill watched the two with a thought that set the blood running swiftly behind the mask of his careless smile. They had slipped a mile downstream when he leaned over and laid a fearless hand on Kazan’s head. Something in the touch of that hand, and in the professor’s voice, kept Kazan from a desire to snap at him. He tolerated the friendship with expressionless eyes and a motionless body.

“I was beginning to fear I wouldn’t have much sleep, old boy,” chuckled McGill ambiguously, “but I guess I can take a nap now and then with you along!”

For three days the journey continued without mishap along the shore of Lake Athabasca. On the fourth night McGill pitched his tent in a clump of Banksian pine a hundred yards back from the water. All that day the wind had come steadily from behind them, and for at least a half of the day the professor had been watching Kazan closely. From the west there had now and then come a scent that stirred Kazan uneasily. Since noon he had sniffed that wind. Twice McGill had heard him growling deep in his throat, and once, when the scent had come stronger than usual, he had bared his fangs, and the bristles stood up along his spine.

For an hour after striking camp the professor did not build a lire, but sat looking up the shore of the lake through his hunting glass. It was dusk when he returned to where he had put up his tent and chained the dogs. For a few moments he stood unobserved, looking at the wolf-dog. Kazan was still uneasy. He lay facing the west. McGill made note of this, for the big Dane lay behind Kazan—to the east.

Behind a rock McGill built a very small fire, and prepared supper. After this he went into the tent, and when he came out he carried a blanket under his arm. He chuckled as he stood for a moment over Kazan.

“We’re not going to sleep in there tonight, old boy,” he said. “I don’t like what you’ve found in the west wind.” He laughed and buried himself in a clump of stunted Banksians thirty paces from the tent. Here he rolled himself in his blanket, and went to sleep.

It was a quiet, starlit night, and hours afterward Kazan dropped his nose between his forepaws and drowsed. It was the snap of a twig that roused him. The sound did not awaken the sluggish Dane, but instantly Kazan’s head was alert, his keen nostrils sniffing the air. What he had smelled all day was heavy about him now.

Slowly, from out of the Banksians behind the tent, there came a figure. It was not that of the professor. It approached cautiously, with lowered head and hunched shoulders, and the starlight revealed the murderous face of Sandy McTrigger. Kazan crouched low. He laid his head flat between his forepaws. His long fangs gleamed. But he made no sound that betrayed his concealment under a thick Banksian shrub. Step by step Sandy approached, and at last he reached the flap of the tent. He did not carry a club or a whip in his hand now. In the place of either of those was the glitter of steel. At the door to the tent he paused, and peered in, his back to Kazan.

Silently, swiftly—the wolf now, in every movement—Kazan came to his feet. He forgot the chain that held him. Ten feet away stood the enemy he hated above all others he had ever known. Every ounce of strength in his splendid body gathered itself for the spring. And then he leaped. This time the chain did not pull him back, almost neck-broken. Age and the elements had weakened the leather collar he had worn since the days of his slavery in the traces, and it gave way with a snap. Sandy turned, and in a second leap Kazan’s fangs sank into the flesh of his arm. With a startled cry the man fell, and as they rolled over on the ground the big Dane’s deep voice rolled out in thunderous alarm.

In the fall Kazan’s hold was broken. In an instant he was on his feet, ready for another attack. And then the change came. He was free. The collar was gone from his neck. The forest, the stars, the whispering wind were all about him. Here were men, and off there was—Gray Wolf! His ears dropped, and he turned swiftly, and slipped like a shadow back into the glorious freedom of his world.

A hundred yards away something stopped him for an instant. It was not the big Dane’s voice, but the sharp crack—crack—crack of the little professor’s automatic. And above that sound there rose the voice of Sandy McTrigger in a weird and terrible cry.

II

Mile after mile Kazan went on. For a time he was oppressed by the shivering note of death that had come to him in Sandy McTrigger’s cry, and he slipped through the Banksians like a shadow, his ears flattened, his tail trailing, his hind quarters betraying that curious slinking quality of the wolf and dog stealing away from danger. Then he came out upon a plain, and the stillness, the billion stars in the clear vault of the sky, and the keen air that carried with it a breath of the Arctic barrens brought him alert and questing. He faced in the direction of the wind. Somewhere off there, far to the south and west, was Gray Wolf. For the first time in many weeks he sat back on his haunches and gave the deep and vibrant call that echoed weirdly for miles about him. Back in the Banksians the big Dane heard it, and whined. From over the still body of Sandy McTrigger the little professor looked up with a white, tense face, and listened for a second cry.

But to that first call instinct told Kazan that there would be no answer, and now he struck out swiftly, galloping mile after mile, as a dog follows the trail of its master home. He did not turn back to the lake, nor was his direction toward Red Gold City. As straight as he might have followed a road blazed by the hand of man, he cut across the forty miles of plain and swamp and forest and rocky ridge that lay between him and the McFarlane. All that night he did not call again for Gray Wolf. With him, reasoning was a process brought about by habit—by precedent, and as Gray Wolf had waited for him many times before, he believed that she would be waiting for him now somewhere near the sandbar.

By dawn he had reached the river, within three miles of the sandbar. Scarcely was the sun up when he stood on the white strip of sand where he and Gray Wolf had come down to drink. Expectantly and confidently he looked about him for Gray Wolf, whining softly and wagging his tail. He began to search for her scent, but rains had washed even her footprints from the clean sand. All that day he searched for her along the river and out on the plain. Again and again he sat back on his haunches and sent out his mating cry to her.

And slowly, as he did these things, nature was working in him that miracle of the wild which the Crees have named the “spirit call.” As it had worked in Gray Wolf, so now it stirred the blood of Kazan. With the going of the sun, and the sweeping about him of shadowy night, he turned more and more to the south and east. His whole world was made up of the trails over which he had hunted. That world, in his comprehension of it, ran from the McFarlane in a narrow trail through the forest and over the plains to the little valley from which the beavers had driven them. If Gray Wolf was not here—she was there, and tirelessly he resumed his quest of her.

Not until the stars were fading out of the sky again, and gray day was giving place to night, did exhaustion and hunger stop him. He killed a rabbit, and for hours after he had feasted, he lay dose to his kill, and slept. Then he went on.

The fourth night he came to the little valley between the two ridges, and under the stars, more brilliant now in the chill clearness of the early autumn nights, he followed the creek down into their old swamp home. It was broad day when he reached the edge of the great beaver pond that now completely surrounded the windfall under which Gray Wolf’s second-born had come into the world. Broken Tooth and the other beavers had wrought a big change in what had once been his home and Gray Wolf’s, and for many minutes Kazan stood silent and motionless at the edge of the pond, sniffing the air heavy with the unpleasant odor of the usurpers.

Until now his spirit had remained unbroken. Footsore, with thinned sides and gaunt head, he circled slowly through the swamp. All that day he searched. And his crest lay flat now, and there was a hunted look in the droop of his shoulders and in the shifting look in his eyes. Gray Wolf was gone. Slowly nature was impinging that fact upon him. She had passed out of his world and out of his life, and he was filled with a loneliness and a grief so great that the forest seemed strange, and the stillness of the wild a thing that now oppressed and frightened him.

Once more the dog in him was mastering the wolf. With Gray Wolf he had possessed the world of freedom. Without her, that world was so big and strange and empty that it appalled him.

That night he slunk under a log. Deep in the night he grieved in his slumber, like a child. And day after day, and night after night, Kazan remained a slinking creature of the big swamp, mourning for the one creature that had brought him out of chaos into light, who had filled his world for him, and who, in going from him, had taken from this world even the things that Gray Wolf had lost in her blindness.

III

In the golden glow of the autumn sun there one day came up the stream overlooked by the Sun Rock a man, a woman, and a child. Almost two years had passed since Joan, the girl-wife, had left these regions with her trapper husband for a taste of that distant world which is known as Civilization. All her life, except the years she had passed at a Mission school over at Fort Churchill, she had lived in the forests—a wild flower of nature as truly as the velvety bakneesh flowers among the rocks. And civilization had done for her what it had done for many another wild flower transplanted from the depths of the wilderness. She did not look as she did in the days when she was Kazan’s mistress, and when the wolf-dog’s loyalty was divided between Gray Wolf, on the Sun Rock, and Joan, in the cabin half a mile away. Her cheeks were thin. Her blue eyes had lost their luster. She coughed, and when she coughed the man looked at her with love and fear in his eyes.

But now, slowly, the man had begun to see the transformation, and on the day their canoe pointed up the stream and into the wonderful valley that had been their home before the call of the distant city came to them, he noted the flush gathering once more in her cheeks, the fuller redness of her lips, and the gathering glow of happiness and content in her eyes. He laughed softly as he saw these things, and he blessed the forests.

“You are happy again, Joan,” he said joyously. “The doctors were right. You are a part of the forests.”

“Yes, I am happy,” she whispered, and suddenly there came a little thrill into her voice, and she pointed to a white finger of sand running out into the stream. “Do you remember—years and years ago, it seems—that Kazan left us here? She was on the sand over there, calling to him. Do you remember?” There came a little tremble to her mouth. “I wonder—where they—have gone.”

The cabin was as they had left it. Only the crimson bakneesh had grown up about it, and shrubs and tall grass had sprung up near its walls. Once more it took on life, and day by day the color came deeper into Joan’s cheeks, and her voice was filled with its old wild sweetness of song. Joan’s husband cleared the trails over his old trap-lines, and Joan and the little Joan, who romped and talked now, transformed the cabin into home. One night the man returned to the cabin late, and when he came in there was a glow of excitement in Joan’s blue eyes.

“Did you hear it?” she asked. “Did you hear—the call?”

He nodded, stroking her soft hair.

“I was a mile back in the creek swamp,” he said. “I heard it!”

Joan’s hands clutched his arms.

“It wasn’t Kazan,” she said. “I would recognize his voice. But it seemed to me it was like the other—the call that came that morning from the sandbar, his mate’s.”

The man was thinking. Joan’s fingers tightened. She was breathing a little quickly.

“Will you promise me this?” she asked. “Will you promise me that you will never hunt or trap for wolves?”

“I had thought of that,” he replied. “I thought of it—after I heard the call. Yes, I will promise.”

Joan’s arms stole up about his neck.

“We loved Kazan,” she whispered. “And you might kill him—or her.”

Suddenly she stopped. Both listened. The door was a little ajar, and to them there came again the wailing mate-call of the wolf. Joan ran to the door. Her husband followed. Together they stood silent, and with tense breath Joan pointed over the starlit plain.

“Listen! Listen!” she commanded. “It’s her cry, and it came from the Sun Rock!”

She ran out into the night, forgetting that the man was close behind her now, forgetting that little Joan was alone in her bed. And to them, from miles and miles across the plain, there came a wailing cry in answer—a cry that seemed a part of the wind, and that thrilled Joan until her breath broke in a strange sob.

Farther out on the plain she went, and then stopped, with the golden glow of the autumn moon and the stars shimmering in her hair and eyes. It was many minutes before the cry came again, and then it was so near that Joan put her hands to her mouth, and her cry rang out over the plain as of old:

“Kazan! Kazan! Kazan!”

At the top of the Sun Rock, Gray Wolf—gaunt and thinned by starvation—heard the woman’s cry, and the call that was in her throat died away in a whine. And to the north a swiftly moving shadow stopped for a moment, and stood like a thing of rock under the starlight. It was Kazan. A strange fire leaped through his body. Every fiber of his brute understanding was afire with the knowledge that here was home. It was here, long ago, that he had lived, and loved, and fought—and all at once the dreams that had grown faded and indistinct in his memory came back to him as real, living things. For, coming to him faintly over the plain, he heard Joan’s voice!

In the starlight Joan stood, tense and white, when from out of the pale mists of the moon-glow he came to her, cringing on his belly, panting and wind-run, and with a strange whining note in his throat. To Joan, Kazan was more than mere dog. Next to her husband and baby she loved him. There passed through her mind a day when he had saved her and the baby from the wolves—and again the scene of that other day when he had leaped upon the giant husky that was at the throat of little Joan. . . . As her arms hugged Kazan’s great shaggy head up to her, the man heard the whining, gasping joy of the beast.

And then there came once more across the plain Gray Wolf’s mate-seeking cry of grief and of loneliness. Swiftly, as though struck by a lash, Kazan was on his feet. In another instant he was gone.

“Now do you believe?” cried Joan pantingly. “Now do you believe in the God of my world—the God I have lived with, the God that gives souls to the wild things, the God that—that has brought—us all—together—once more—home!”

His arms closed gently about her.

“I believe, my Joan,” he whispered. Afterward they sat in the starlight in front of the cabin. But they did not hear again that lonely cry from the Sun Rock. Joan and her husband understood. “He’ll visit us again tomorrow,” the man said at last. “Come, Joan, let us go to bed.” Together they entered the cabin. And that night, side by side, Kazan and Gray Wolf hunted again on the moonlit plain.