He stood in the heart of a vast
world, and for him that world was empty. He was an outcast. His
heart crying out for comradeship, he found that all things feared
him or hated him. He was a pariah; a wanderer without a friend or
a home. He did not reason these things but the gloom of them
settled upon him like black night.
He did not return to his windfall. In a little open he sat on his
haunches, listening to the night sounds, and watching the stars as
they came out. There was an early moon, and as it came up over the
forest, a great throbbing red disc that seemed filled with life,
he howled mournfully in the face of it. He wandered out into a big
burn a little later, and there the night was like day, so clear
that his shadow followed him and all other things about him cast
shadows, And then, all at once, he caught in the night wind a
sound which he had heard many times before.
It came from far away, and it was like a whisper at first, an echo
of strange voices riding on the wind, A hundred times he had heard
that cry of the wolves. Since Maheegun, the she-wolf, had gashed
his shoulder so fiercely away back in the days of his puppyhood
he had evaded the path of that cry. He had learned, in a way, to
hate it.
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