And all these sounds of the
wilderness night spoke to the little cub of some new thing, of swift
feet that follow and of something unknown and terrible that waits for
all unwary wild things. So fear was born.
The long journey ended at last before a dark hole in the hillside; and
the smell of his mother, the only familiar thing in his first strange
pilgrimage, greeted the cub from the rocks on either side as he passed
in out of the starlight. He was dropped without a sound in a larger den,
on some fresh-gathered leaves and dead grass, and lay there all alone,
very still, with the new feeling trembling all over him. A long hour
passed; a second cub was laid beside him, and the mother vanished as
before; another hour, and the wolf cubs were all together again with the
mother feeding them. Nor did any of them know where they were, nor why
they had come, nor the long, long way that led back to where the trail
began.
Next day when they were called out to play they saw a different and more
gloomy landscape, a chaos of granite rocks, a forest of evergreen, the
white plunge and rolling mist of a mountain torrent; but no silver sea
with fishing-boats drifting over it, like clouds in the sea over their
heads, and no gray hut with children running about like ants on the
distant shore.
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