106 Northern Trails. Book I 
The second winter had come, sealing up the gloomy 
land till it rang like iron at the touch, then covering it 
deep with snow and polishing its mute white face with 
hoar-frost and hail driven onward by the fierce Arctic 
gales. An appalling silence rested on plains and moun¬ 
tains. Not a chirp, not a rustle broke the intense, 
unnatural stillness. One might travel all day long with¬ 
out a sight or sound of life; and when the early twilight 
came and life stirred shyly from its coverts and snow 
caves, the Wood Folk stole out into the bare white 
world on noiseless, hesitating feet, as if in presence of 
the dead. 
When the Moon of Famine came, the silence was 
rudely broken. Before daylight one morning, when the 
air was so tense and still that a whisper set it tinkling 
like silver bells, the rallying cry of the wolves rolled 
down from a mountain top; and the three cubs, that 
had waited long for the signal, left their separate trails 
far away and hurried to join the old leader. 
When the sun rose that morning one who stood on 
the high ridge of the Top Gallants, far to the eastward 
of Harbor Weal, would have seen seven trails winding 
down among the ’rocks and thickets. It needed only a 
glance to show that the seven trails, each one as clear- 
cut and delicate as that of a prowling fox, were the 
records of wolves’ cautious feet; and that they were no 
longer beating the thickets for grouse and rabbits, but 
