It needed only a
glance to show that the seven trails, each one as clear-cut and delicate
as that of a prowling fox, were the records of wolves' cautious feet;
and that they were no longer beating the thickets for grouse and
rabbits, but moving swiftly all together for the edges of the vast
barrens where the caribou herds were feeding. Another glance--but here
we must have the cunning eyes of Old Tomah the hunter--would have told
that two of the trails were those of enormous wolves which led the pack;
two others were plainly cubs that had not yet lost the cub trick of
frolicking in the soft snow; while three others were just wolves, big
and powerful brutes that moved as if on steel springs, and that still
held to the old pack because the time had not yet come for them to
scatter finally to their separate ways and head new packs of their own
in the great solitudes.
Out from the woods on the other side of the barren came two snow-shoe
trails, which advanced with short steps and rested lightly on the snow,
as if the makers of the trails were little people whose weight on the
snow-shoes made hardly more impression than the broad pads of Moktaques
the rabbit.
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