The Voice of the Pack

s a season all by itself. It wasn't exactly summer, because already a little silver sheath of ice formed on the lakes in the morning; and the days were clamping down in length

he two seasons,-the rag-tail of

without detecting him. But the cougar always saw to it they didn't do it a second time. It had been a particularly bad season for Whisperfoot, and he was glad that his luck had changed. The woods were so dry from the long drought that even he-and as all men know, he is one of the most silent creatures in the wil

ack coat and a clumsy stride; and he couldn't have caught a deer if his life had depended upon it. But he did like to shuffle through the fallen leaves and make beds of them in the w

arth why they were doing it, except that a quiver at the end of their tails told them to do so; but the result was entirely the same. They would have a shelter for the winter. Certain of the birds were beginning to wonder what the land was like to the south, and now and then waking up in the crisp dawns with decided longings for travel. The young malla

l the forest voices added to it,-the wail of the geese, the sad fluttering of fallen leaves, and even the whisper of the north wind. The pines seemed darker, and now and then gray clouds gathered, promised rain, but passed without dropping their burdens on the parched hillside

ad not been mistaken in thinking him a natural woodsman. He had imagination and insight and sympathy; but most of all he had a heritage of woo

anship now. He had the natural cold nerve of a marksman, and one twilight he brought the body of a lynx tumbling through the branches of a pine at a distance of two hundred yards. A shotgun is never a mountaineer's weapon-except a sawed-off specimen for family contingencies-yet Dan acquired

d. There is no more beautiful thing in the wilderness world than a steelhead trout in action. He simply seems to dance on the surface of the water, leaping again and again, and racing at an unheard-of speed down the ripples. He weighs only from three to fifteen pounds. But now and again amateur fishermen without souls have tried to pull him in with main s

ll he simply studied, as his frontiersmen ancestors had done before him. He found unceasing delight in the sagacity of the bear, the grace of the felines, the bea

es, than he had ever seen before with the help of the lens. And the moonlight came down through a rift in the trees an

the four that you gave yourself after you arrived h

en I came. To-day I climbed halfway up Baldy-within a h

ght, Lennox was not in the least afraid of complications. The love of the mountain women does not go out to physical inferiors. "Whoever gets her," he had said, "will have to tame her," and his words still held

mountains. There is no softness, no compromise: the male of the species provides, and the female keeps the hut. It is good, the mountain women know, when the snows come, to have a strong arm to lean upon. The man of strong muscles, of quick aim, of cool nerve in a crisis is the man that can be safely

catch the spirit of the endless forest that stretched in front of the house. The moon was above the pines at last, and its lig

that came so tingling and tremulous out of the darkness. As always, they heard the stir and rustle of the gnawing people: the chipmunks in the shrubbery, the gophers w

had heard on previous nights. It was not so high, so piercing and triumphant; but had rather an angry, snarling tone made up

killed," Dan s

t it. They often snarl that way when they miss t

rt cunningly wrought in miniature. In one quality alone it resembled the cougar's cry. It was unquestionably a wilderness voice,-no sound made by men or the instruments of men; and like the cougar's cry, it was simply imbued wi