The Wolf Hunters by James Oliver Curwood

Cold winter lay deep in the Canadian wilderness. Over it the moon was

rising, like a red pulsating ball, lighting up the vast white silence of

the night in a shimmering glow. Not a sound broke the stillness of the

desolation. It was too late for the life of day, too early for the

nocturnal roamings and voices of the creatures of the night. Like the

basin of a great amphitheater the frozen lake lay revealed in the light

of the moon and a billion stars. Beyond it rose the spruce forest, black

and forbidding. Along its nearer edges stood hushed walls of tamarack,

bowed in the smothering clutch of snow and ice, shut in by impenetrable

gloom.

A huge white owl flitted out of this rim of blackness, then back again,

and its first quavering hoot came softly, as though the mystic hour of

silence had not yet passed for the night-folk. The snow of the day had

ceased, hardly a breath of air stirred the ice-coated twigs of the

trees. Yet it was bitter cold--so cold that a man, remaining motionless,

would have frozen to death within an hour.

Suddenly there was a break in the silence, a weird, thrilling sound,

like a great sigh, but not human--a sound to make one's blood run faster

and fingers twitch on rifle-stock. It came from the gloom of the

tamaracks. After it there fell a deeper silence than before, and the

owl, like a noiseless snowflake, drifted out over the frozen lake. After

a few moments it came again, more faintly than before. One versed in

woodcraft would have slunk deeper into the rim of blackness, and

listened, and wondered, and watched; for in the sound he would have

recognized the wild, half-conquered note of a wounded beast's suffering

and agony.