title: Trail of the Caribou: A Tale of Dire Wolves in the Time of the Ice Age
author: Alexandria Joyce
description: Alexandria Joyce is currently a student of Ecology and Creative Writing in Northern California. She is particularly fond of wolves as they encompass the human traits of compassion, sacrifice, and loyalty as well as the instinctual animal trait of competitiveness in a world fully-integrated into the ecosystem around them. Her favorite hobbies are traveling, skiing, hiking, camping, backpacking, soccer, reading, and writing.
zlib_text: ## PART I
  
  
  ### CHAPTER I
  
  
  \--THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT
  
  
  * * *
  
  Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had
  been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they
  seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A
  vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation,
  lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not
  even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter
  more terrible than any sadness--a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of
  the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of
  infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity
  laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the
  savage, frozen- hearted Northland Wild.
  
  
  But there WAS life, abroad in the land and defiant. Down the frozen waterway
  toiled a string of wolfish dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed with 