he lingered; and when he had recuperated, after several days' sojourn, he disappeared.
And this would have been the end of him, so far as Irvine and his wife were concerned, had
not Irvine at that particular time been called away into the northern part of the state. Riding
along on the train, near to the line between California and Oregon, he chanced to look out
of the window and saw his unsociable guest sliding along the wagon road, brown and
wolfish, tired yet tireless, dust-covered and soiled with two hundred miles of travel.
Now Irvine was a man of impulse, a poet. He got off the train at the next station, bought a
piece of meat at a butcher shop, and captured the vagrant on the outskirts of the town. The
return trip was made in the baggage car, and so Wolf came a second time to the mountain
cottage. Here he was tied up for a week and made love to by the man and woman. But it
was very circumspect love-making. Remote and alien as a traveller from another planet, he
snarled down their soft-spoken love-words. He never barked. In all the time they had him
he was never known to bark.
To win him became a problem. Irvine liked problems. He had a metal plate made, on which
was stamped: RETURN TO WALT IRVINE, GLEN ELLEN, SONOMA COUNTY,
CALIFORNIA. This was riveted to a collar and strapped about the dog's neck. Then he was
turned loose, and promptly he disappeared. A day later came a telegram from Mendocino
County. In twenty hours he had made over a hundred miles to the north, and was still going
when captured.
He came back by Wells Fargo Express, was tied up three days, and was loosed on the fourth
and lost. This time he gained southern Oregon before he was caught and returned. Always,
as soon as he received his liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He was possessed
of an obsession that drove him north. The homing instinct, Irvine called it, after he had
expended the selling price of a sonnet in getting the animal back from northern Oregon.
Another time the brown wanderer succeeded in traversing half the length of California, all
of Oregon, and most of Washington, before he was picked up and returned "Collect." A
remarkable thing was the speed with which he travelled. Fed up and rested, as soon as he
was loosed he devoted all his energy to getting over the ground. On the first day's run he
was known to cover as high as a hundred and fifty miles, and after that he would average a
hundred miles a day until caught. He always arrived back lean and hungry and savage, and
always departed fresh and vigorous, cleaving his way northward in response to some
prompting of his being that no one could understand.
But at last, after a futile year of flight, he accepted the inevitable and elected to remain at
the cottage where first he had killed the rabbit and slept by the spring. Even after that, a
long time elapsed before the man and woman succeeded in patting him. It was a great
victory, for they alone were allowed to put hands on him. He was fastidiously exclusive,
and no guest at the cottage ever succeeded in making up to him. A low growl greeted such
approach; if any one had the hardihood to come nearer, the lips lifted, the naked fangs
appeared, and the growl became a snarl - a snarl so terrible and malignant that it awed the
stoutest of them, as it likewise awed the farmers' dogs that knew ordinary dog- snarling, but
had never seen wolf-snarling before.
He was without antecedents. His history began with Walt and Madge. He had come up from