now. Then his greatest longing was for his mother. Since then a still greater yearning had come into his life—for food. In a way it was fortunate for him that he had almost died of exhaustion and starvation, for his experience had helped to make a man of him—or a wolf-dog, just as you are of a mind to put it. He would miss his mother for a long time. But he would never miss her again as he had missed her yesterday, and the day before.

That afternoon Baree took a long nap close to his cache. Then he uncovered the partridge and ate his supper. When his fourth night alone came, he did not hide himself as he had done on the three preceding nights. He was strangely and curiously alert. Under the moon and the stars he prowled in the edge of the forest and out on the burn. He listened with a new kind of thrill to the far-away cry of a wolf-pack on the hunt. He listened to the ghostly whoo-whoo-whoo of the owls without shivering. Sounds and silences were beginning to hold a new and significant note for him.

For another day and night Baree remained in the vicinity of his cache. When the last bone was picked, he moved on. He now entered a country where subsistence was no longer a perilous problem for him. It was a lynx country, and where there are lynx, there are also a great many rabbits. When the rabbits thin out, the lynx emigrate to better hunting-grounds. As the snowshoe rabbit breeds all the summer through, Baree found himself in a land of plenty. It was not difficult for him to catch and kill the young rabbits. For a week he prospered and grew bigger and stronger each day. But all the time, stirred by that seeking, Wanderlust spirit—still hoping to find the old home and his mother—he travelled into the north and east.

And this was straight into the trapping country of Pierrot, the halfbreed.

Pierrot, until two yea