The old man had seen the big wolf for the fi rst time early in the spring. He was riding bareback along the creek checking his cows and looked up suddenly to see the wolf standing on the bluff south of the house. It was a mile or more away but even at the distance it looked big as a horse. Later when he came to know it better and to recognize its distinctive track no matter what ground condition he found it in the old man estimated its weight at a hundred and fifty pounds or maybe a hundred and seventy-five if its belly was full but belly full or empty, it walked over the face of his land which it lay joint claim to with authority and without fear as nothing else had walked it since the old man was a boy and the great shaggies had grazed the flats along the Palo Duro by the thousands and drank there from the deep pools. But even in that fabled time it would have walked alone a path all others had given over with news of its coming a wolf in the body of a horse. Big as a damned horse! Its paw prints along the edges of the fi elds and in the soft mud along the ditch were that big and that deep! As the days passed it walked the valley on its great feet not in evening's shadow or at false dawn as others of its kind were wont to do and had done for ten thousand years but in gaudy day over the broad land fully lighted and it did not move on seeking more remote territory as the old man had expected it to do. Somehow it seemed to be more than just a wolf and not in its enormous size alone but also in some other way which the old man could not identify and it became in his mind even as it was in reality a superwolf.