THE VOICE OF THE PACK
PROLOGUE
If one can just lie close enough to the breast of the wilderness, he can't help but be imbued with some of the life that pulses therein.—From a Frontiersman's Diary.
Long ago, when the great city of Gitcheapolis was a rather small, untidy hamlet in the middle of a plain, it used to be that a pool of water, possibly two hundred feet square, gathered every spring immediately back of the courthouse. The snow falls thick and heavy in Gitcheapolis in winter; and the pond was nothing more than snow water that the inefficient drainage system of the city did not quite absorb. Now snow water is occasionally the most limpid, melted-crystal thing in the world. There are places just two thousand miles west of Gitcheapolis where you can see it pouring pure and fresh off of the snow fields, scouring out a ravine from the great rock wall of a mountain side, leaping faster than a deer leaps—and when you speak of the speed of a descending deer you speak of something the usual
