Page:Silversheene (1924).djvu/152

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all been pleasant he might have gone back to man, but half of them were very bad, and they helped swell the influences that drove him steadily back to the primitive life.

Thus it happened, as the winter months went by, that the dreams and the pictures of civilization grew fainter and fainter, and the hold of Dick and Hilda weaker and weaker upon him, while the call of the wilderness grew louder and louder.

Often he would spring up from his sleep and scramble out of his place of hiding under the old pine to see what it was that had called him, but he would find nothing. He knew that there were wolves about, for just as he had finished the last of the dry salmon a pack had descended upon the scene of the disaster to François and his team and picked their bones clean. So it happened that the gray wolf finished the retribution that the dog team had begun. When spring at last came there was nothing left