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Northern Trails. Book I 
musical hoot with two short barks at the end, would 
come singing down from the uplands; and the wolves, 
leaving instantly the game they were following, would 
hasten up to find the two cubs herding a caribou in a 
cleft of the rocks, — a young caribou that had lost his 
mother at the hands of the hunters, and that did not 
know how to take care of himself. And one of the cubs 
would hold him there, sitting on his tail in front of the 
caribou to prevent his escape, while the other cub called 
the wolves away from their own hunting to come and 
join the feast. 
Whether this were a conscious attempt to spare the 
game, or to alarm it as little as need be, it is impossible 
to say. Certainly the wolves know, better apparently than 
men, that persistent hunting destroys its own object, and 
that caribou especially, when much alarmed by dogs or 
wolves or men, will take the alarm quickly, and the scat¬ 
tered herds, moved by a common impulse of danger, will 
trail far away to other ranges. That is why the wolf, 
unlike the less intelligent dog, hunts always in a silent, 
stealthy, unobtrusive way; and why he stops hunting 
and goes away the instant his own hunger is satisfied 
or another wolf kills enough for all. And that is also 
the probable reason why he lets the deer alone as long 
as he can find any other game. 
This same intelligent provision was shown in another 
curious way. When a wolf in his wide ranging found a 
