A wolf rarely grips and holds an enemy; he snaps and lets go,
and snaps again at every swift chance; but here he must either hold fast
or lose his big game; and what between holding and letting go, as the
seals whirled with bared teeth and snapped viciously in turn, as they
scrambled away to the sea, the wolves had a lively time of it. Often
indeed, spite of three or four wolves, a big seal would tumble into the
tide, where the sharks followed his bloody trail and soon finished him.
Now for the first time the wolves, led by the rich abundance, began to
kill more than they needed for food and to hide it away, like the
squirrels, in anticipation of the coming winter. Like the blue and the
Arctic foxes, a strange instinct to store things seems to stir dimly at
times within them. Occasionally, instead of eating and sleeping after a
kill, the cubs, led by the mother wolf, would hunt half of the day and
night and carry all they caught to the snow-fields. There each one would
search out a cranny in the rocks and hide his game, covering it over
deeply with snow to kill the scent of it from the prowling foxes.
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