28 
Northern Trails . Book I 
alarm, glided over the spot where a moment before 
Mooka and Noel had been watching. Swiftly, silently 
she followed their steps; found the old trails coming up 
and the fresh trails returning; then, sure at last that no 
danger threatened her own little ones, she loped away 
up the hill and over the topmost ridge to the caribou 
barrens and the thickets where young rabbits were 
already stirring about in the twilight. 
That night, in the cabin under the cliffs, Old Tomah 
had to rehearse again all the wolf lore learned in sixty 
years of hunting: how, fortunately for the deer, these 
enormous wolves had never been abundant and were 
now very rare, a few having been shot, and more 
poisoned in the starving times, and the rest having 
vanished, mysteriously as wolves do, for some unknown 
reason. Bears, which are easily trapped and shot and 
whose skins are worth each a month’s wages to the 
fishermen, still hold their own and even increase on the 
great island; while the wolves, once more numerous, 
are slowly vanishing, though they are never hunted, and 
not even Old Tomah himself could set a trap cunningly 
enough to catch one. The old hunter told, while Mooka 
and Noel held their breaths and drew closer to the light, 
how once, when he made his camp alone under a cliff 
on the lake shore, seven huge wolves, white as the 
snow, came racing swift and silent over the ice straight 
at the fire which he had barely time to kindle; how he 
