That was a winter long remembered in the Cherokee mountain towns. Some named it the Winter of the Unending Snow; others recalled it as the Winter of the Wolves. With the first light snowfall in mid-autumn the wolf invasion began; such wolves and such wolf packs as had never before been known in the Overhills. All that white winter, that winter of pitiless Arctic cold, they harried the deer of the mountain woods, and more than once, when hunger had maddened them and the odds were in their favor, they took human prey. It was their fangs that tore the life out of Dagantu, that tall war captain of the Cherokees, who met his end in a dark gap of the mountains, known ever afterwards as the Defile of Waya, the Defile of the Wolves.
The first snow of that winter—or, rather, of that autumn, for it was early October—fell upon Awi Agwa, the great bull elk, not more than an hour after Almayne had wounded him. Awi Agwa was unaware of the falling flakes which melted as quickly as they fell. He was mad with the pain which had stabbed him suddenly in his right shoulder, the pain which now stabbed him at every stride. Almayne, plodding onward through the forest, three miles behind the elk, frowned as the light rain, which had been falling for half an hour, turned suddenly white. If the snowfall continued tracking
