12 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS 
and that was a high-power rifle, the shining black 
stick which men, those slow, two-legged creatures 
with the peculiar smell, carry in their hands, and 
which make a great noise, spit fire, and kill from 
a long way off. 
Swiftfoot’s earliest grown up recollections had 
to do with men and rifles. He was one of a pack, 
a fine, strong pack of nine gray wolves which 
hunted and traveled together, well knowing the 
value of union. They ranged a different forest 
from this one where he now was, a forest of low 
evergreens, with numerous bogs overlaid by a 
shaking carpet of sphagnum moss, far up in the 
cold north. The nine of them, tongues out, teeth 
gleaming, eyes dilated, would run a young moose 
or a deer for hours through this land, driving him 
if they could to some bog at last where he broke 
through, and Swiftfoot and his fellows, held up 
on the shaking moss, caught him on flank and 
throat and shoulder, and killed him, and feasted. 
Then, one day, the two-legged creatures came, 
with the funny smell. One of them had discov- 
ered something yellow in the ground, and all the 
rest followed, and began to dig the earth, and cut 
