It was the voice of Hela, his giant father; the voice of
Numa, his mother; the voice of his kind for a hundred and a
thousand generations before him, and it was the instinct of those
generations and the hazy memory of his earliest puppyhood that
were impinging the thing upon him. A little later it would take
both intelligence and experience to make him discriminate the
hair-breadth difference between wolf and dog. And this voice of
his blood was COMING! It bore down upon them swiftly, fierce and
filled with the blood-lust of hunger. He forgot Neewa. He did not
observe the cub when he slunk back deeper under the windfall. He
rose up on his feet and stood stiff and tense, unconscious of all
things but that thrilling tongue of the hunt-pack.
Wind-broken, his strength failing him, and his eyes wildly
searching the night ahead for the gleam of water that might save
him, Ahtik, the young caribou bull, raced for his life a hundred
yards ahead of the wolves. The pack had already flung itself out
in the form of a horse-shoe, and the two ends were beginning to
creep up abreast of Ahtik, ready to close in for the hamstring--
and the kill. In these last minutes every throat was silent, and
the young bull sensed the beginning of the end.
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