That night, in the cabin under the cliffs, Old Tomah had to rehearse
again all the wolf lore learned in sixty years of hunting: how,
fortunately for the deer, these enormous wolves had never been abundant
and were now very rare, a few having been shot, and more poisoned in the
starving times, and the rest having vanished, mysteriously as wolves do,
for some unknown reason. Bears, which are easily trapped and shot and
whose skins are worth each a month's wages to the fishermen, still hold
their own and even increase on the great island; while the wolves, once
more numerous, are slowly vanishing, though they are never hunted, and
not even Old Tomah himself could set a trap cunningly enough to catch
one. The old hunter told, while Mooka and Noel held their breaths and
drew closer to the light, how once, when he made his camp alone under a
cliff on the lake shore, seven huge wolves, white as the snow, came
racing swift and silent over the ice straight at the fire which he had
barely time to kindle; how he shot two, and the others, seizing the fish
he had just caught through the ice for his own supper, vanished over the
bank; and he could not say even now whether they meant him harm or no.
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