The swinging
rack of these big white wanderers looks easy enough when you see it; but
when the fleet staghounds are slipped, as has been more than once tested
in Newfoundland, try as hard as they will they cannot keep within sight
of the deer for a single quarter-mile, and no limit has ever yet been
found, either by dog or wolf, to Megaleep's tirelessness. So the old
wolves, relying possibly upon past experience, keep the cubs and hold
themselves strictly to small game as long as it can possibly be found.
Then when the bitter days of late winter come, with their scarcity of
small game and their unbearable hunger, the wolves turn to the caribou
as a last resort, killing a few here by stealth, rather than speed, and
then, when the game grows wild, going far off to another range where the
deer have not been disturbed and so can be approached more easily.
On this afternoon, however, the old mother wolf had run plump upon the
caribou and her fawns in the midst of a thicket, and had leaped forward
promptly to round them up for her hungry cubs. It would have been the
easiest matter in the world for an old wolf to hamstring one of the slow
fawns, or the mother caribou herself as she hovered in the rear to
defend her young; but there were other thoughts in the shaggy gray head
that had seen so much hunting.
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