"We will take it easy from now on," Dan Failing told them, after the camp was cleared of its dead and the fire was built high. "We have plenty of food; and we will travel a little while each day and make warm camps at night. We'll have friendship fires, just as sometimes we used to build on the ridge." "But after you get down into the valleys?" Lennox asked anxiously. "Are you and Snowbird coming up here to live?" The silence fell over their camp; and a wounded wolf whined in the darkness. "Do you think I could leave it now?" Dan asked. By no gift of words could he have explained why; yet he knew that by token of his conquest, his spirit was wedded to the dark forests forever. "But heaven knows what I'll do for a living." Snowbird crept near him, and her eyes shone in the bright firelight. "I've solved that," she said. "You know you studied forestry--and I told the supervisor at the station how much you knew about it. I wasn't going to tell you until--until certain things happened--and now they have happened, I can't wait another instant. He said that with a little more study you could get into the Forest Service--take an examination and become a ranger. You're a natural forester if one ever lived, and you'd love the work." "Besides," Lennox added, "it would clip my Snowbird's wings to make her live on the plains. My big house will be rebuilt, children. There will be fires in the fireplace on the fall nights. There is no use of thinking of the plains." "And there's going to be a smaller house--just a cottage at first--right beside it," Dan replied. He could go back to his forests, after all. He wouldn't have to throw away his birthright, fought for so hard; and it seemed to him no other occupation could offer so much as that of the forest rangers,--those silent, cool-nerved guardians of the forest and keepers of its keys. For a long time Snowbird and he stood together at the edge of the firelight, their bodies warm from the glow, their hearts brimming with words they could not utter. Words always come hard to the mountain people. They are folk of action, and Dan, rather than to words, trusted to the yearning of his arms. "We're made for each other, Snowbird darling," he told her breathlessly at last. "And at last I can claim what I've been waiting for all these months." He claimed it; and in open defiance to all civil law, he collected fully one hundred times in the next few minutes. But it didn't particularly matter, and Snowbird didn't even turn her face. "Maybe you've forgotten you claimed it when you first came back too," she said. So he had. It had completely slipped his mind, in the excitement of his fight with the wolf pack. And then while Lennox pretended to be asleep, they sat, breathless with happiness, on the edge of the sled and watched the dawn come out. They had never seen the snow so lovely in the sunlight. End of Project Gutenberg's The Voice of the Pack, by Edison Marshall