It was during this commotion of biting and kicking mixture of buckskin and mouse colored horseflesh and flying grey wolves that the third and only able wolf disappeared into thin air. Them two fighting ponies had took away all his appetite for colt meat and left a hankering only to be gone from the reach of their destroying hoofs. Three of his kind could of competed with the mad ponies if their attention had been on them from the start, but that's where the slip had been made, and as it was that lone wolf didn't feel at all equal of resuming what the leader of the pack had started.--He left. * * * * * The moon faded away into the sky, break of day had come. Out on the flat the little bunch of ponies was knee deep in the snow and a pawing away for the grass that was underneath, there wasn't a scratch on nary a hide to show that any had ever seen a wolf, but if Smoky and his pardner the buckskin hadn't been in that little bunch there would of been another story to tell. The little colt which was so busy digging up feed for himself and plum ignorant of the close call he'd had would of been amongst the missing and just easing the appetites of three gray wolves, and who knows but what a couple more colts might of been killed along with him, for once a wolf gets a taste of warm blood there's no telling how far he'll go. The "yip, yip" and howl of a cayote sounded off from the hills, and gradual as the sun came up big clouds showed over the skyline from the northwest and seemed like headed to meet and kill that sun's warm rays. By noon that day a blizzard had come and the little bunch of ponies faced it on the way back to the shelter of the hills from where they'd left in their run for life. The howl of a lone wolf was heard that night, and away off to the south there came an answer, an answer that was more drawed out and mournful than any that'd ever been heard. Smoky snorted, but with the buckskin, only his head went up, his ears pointed towards the sound. He knowed wolves and he knowed they wouldn't be back, not that night. The blizzard hung on for a day and filled the ravines with deep drifts, then the wind died and it settled down to a slow falling snow. There was more white mounds where that snow had covered the carcasses of dead critters, but amongst them mounds there was one that wasn't made by any of the bellering grass eating kind.--A big gray wolf layed there, a broke jaw had been the cause of his death. (Some months later a cowboy run down and roped a three legged wolf and remarked as he looked close to where a front leg was missing, how "it must of been an awful wicked bullet to've took that leg off so neat.")