There was food in plenty.The bull weighed over eight hundred pounds -- fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd wolves of the pack.But if they could fast prodigiously, they could feed prodigiously, and soon a few scattered bones were all that remained of the splendid live brute that had faced the pack a few hours before.
There was now much resting and sleeping.With full stomachs, bickering and quarreling began among the younger males, and this continued through the few days that followed before the breaking-up of the pack.The famine was over.The wolves were now in the country of game, and though they still hunted in pack, they hunted more cautiously, cutting out heavy cows or crippled old bulls from the small moose-herds they ran across.
There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split in half and went in different directions.The she-wolf, the young leader on her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half of the pack down to the Mackenzie River and across into the lake country to the east.
Each day this remnant of the pack dwindled.Two by two, male and female, the wolves were deserting.Occasionally a solitary male was driven out by the sharp teeth of his rivals.In the end there remained only four:
the she-wolf, the young leader, the one-eyed one, and the ambitious three-year-old.
The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper.Her three suitors all bore the marks of her teeth.Yet they never replied in kind, never defended themselves against her.They turned their shoulders to her most savage slashes, and with wagging tails and mincing steps strove to placate her wrath.But if they were all mildness toward her, they were all fierceness toward one another.The three-year-old grew too ambitious in his fierceness.
He caught the one-eyed elder on his blind side and ripped his ear into ribbons.Though the grizzled old fellow could see only on one side, against the youth and vigor of the other he brought into play the wisdom of long years of experience.His lost eye and his scarred muzzle bore evidence to the nature of his experience.He had survived too many battles to be in doubt for a moment about what to do.