Impelled by an urge within himself Ben suddenly knelt beside his lupine friend. He could not understand the flood of emotion, the vague sense of impending and dramatic events that stirred him to the quick. He only knew, with a knowledge akin to inspiration, that in Fenris lay the answer to his problem. The moment was misted over with a quality of unreality. In the east rose the moon, shining incredibly on the tree tops, showering down through the little rifts in the withholding branches, enchanting the place as by the weaving of a dream. The moon madness caught up Ben like a flame, enthralling him as never before. He knew that white sphere of old. And all at once he realized that here, at his knees, was one who knew it too,--with a knowledge as ancient and as infinite as his own. Not for nothing had the wolf breed lived their lives beneath it through the long roll of the ages. Its rising and its setting had regulated the hunting hours of the pack time without end; its beams had lighted the game trails where the gray band had bayed after the deer; its light had beheld, since the world was young, the rapturous mating of the old pack leader and his female. Fenris too knew the moon-madness; but unlike Ben he had a means of expression of the wonder and mystery and vague longing that thrilled his wild heart. No man who has heard the pack song to the moon could doubt this fact. It is a long, melancholy wail, poignant with the pain of living, but it tells what man can not. Ben knew, now, why he was a forester, a woodsman famed even among woodsmen. Most of his fellows had been tamed by civilization; they had lived beneath roofs instead of the canopy of heaven, and they had almost forgotten about the moon. Ben, on the other hand, was a recurrence of an earlier type, inheriting little from his immediate ancestors but reverting back a thousand centuries to the Cave and the Squatting Place. His nature was that of prehistoric man rather than that of the son of civilization; and in this lay the explanation for all that had set him apart from the great run of men and had made him the master woodsman that he was. And because his spirit was of the wildwood, because he also knew the magic of the moon, he was able to make this wildwood thing at his feet understand and obey his will. The world of to-day seemed to fade out for him and left only the wolf, its fierce eyes on his own. Time swung back, and this might have been a scene of forgotten ages,--the wolf, the human hunter, the smoldering camp fire, the dark, jagged line of spruce against the sky. It was thus at the edge of the ice. Wolf and man--both children of the wild--had understood each other then; and they could understand each other now. "Fenris, old boy," the man whispered. "Can you find him for me, Fenris? He's out there somewhere--" the man motioned toward the dark--"and I want him. Can you take me to him?"