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Prefatory Note vii
The Freedom of the Black-faced Ram 3
The Master of Golden Pool 25
The Return to the Trails 45
The Little Wolf of the Pool 65
The Little Wolf of the Air 73
The Alien of the Wild 83
The Silver Frost 111
By the Winter Tide 121
The Rivals of Ringwaak 131
The Decoy 155
The Laugh in the Dark 173
The Kings of the Intervale 185
The Kill 197
The Little People of the Sycamore 211
Horns and Antlers 237
In the Deep of the Grass 247
When the Moon Is over the Corn 257
The Truce 267
The Keeper of the Water-Gate 291
When the Moose Cow Calls 311
The Passing of the Black Whelps 323
The Homeward Trail 351
The Watchers of the Trails
The Freedom of the Black-faced Ram
On the top of Ringwaak Hill the black-faced ram stood motionless, looking off with mild, yellow eyes across the wooded level, across the scattered farmsteads of the settlement, and across the bright, retreating spirals of the distant river, to that streak of scarlet light on the horizon which indicated the beginning of sunrise. A few paces below him, half-hidden by a gray stump, a green juniper bush, and a mossy brown hillock, lay a white ewe with a lamb at her side. The ewe's jaws moved leisurely, as she chewed her cud and gazed up with comfortable confidence at the sturdy figure of the ram silhouetted against the brightening sky.
This sunrise was the breaking of the black-faced ram's first day in the wilderness. Never before had he stood on an open hilltop and watched the light spread magically over a wide, wild landscape. Up to the morning of the previous day, his three years of life had been passed in protected, green-hedged valley pastures, amid tilled fields and well-stocked barns, beside a lilied water. This rugged, lonely, wide-visioned world into which fortune had so unexpectedly projected him filled him with wonder. Yet he felt strangely at ease therein. The hedged pastures had never quite suited him; but here, at length, in the great spaces, he felt at home. The fact was that, alike in character and in outward appearance, he was a reversion to far-off ancestors. He was the product of a freak of heredity.
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