Then the moon, big-eyed with wonder, arose above the hills, pouring a weird light upon the dance. Little Wolf, who had been huddling closely against a tepee with an unintelligible fear, now felt the delirium of the dance for the first time. He leaped to his feet with a shout that echoed strange and hoarse from the hills! The whole village, as if awakened from the spell, caught up the cry and sent it trembling up the gulches!
With the hot blood pounding at his temples, Little Wolf swung into the frenzy of the dance. He leaped like the antelope when it catches the scent of the hunter. He was no longer the _zhinga zhinga_ who could never be a brave. The fanaticism of the savage was upon him. With his head thrown back until it caught the full glare of the moon, he danced. It was not a child’s face that the pale light struck; it was the face of a fiend! The unfettered wind of the prairie was in his lungs! The swiftness of the elk was in his feet! He danced until the hills danced about him in a dance of their own. He danced until the moon reeled like a sick man! He danced until his chest felt crushed as with the hug of a grizzly! He danced until the stars and the moon went out, and there was nothing but darkness and a deep, deep oppressive something, like and unlike slumber, upon him! The sun was far up in the heavens when he awoke lying upon the ground where he had fallen with fatigue. He rubbed his eyes and stared about him; the circles of the dance had vanished; the war drums were still. The warriors had ridden out of the village into the mysterious region beyond the hills where great deeds awaited to be done. Only the women and the children and the old men remained in the village.
Then there came upon Little Wolf that overpowering thought of bitterness. He was only a _zhinga zhinga_; he could never be a brave. No, but he would be a wolf! He would live in howling loneliness among the hills!
Yet that day as he prowled about, clad in his wolf skin, he was conscious of not being half so good a wolf as he had been the day before. He did not find it quite within his power to hate his people with whom he had felt the delirium of the war dance. The snarling beat of the war drums had awakened in him a vital interest in the great prairie tragedy of food-getting and war-making.