noon
For five days Breed lived wholly upon the chunks of meat which Shady purloined from the frozen bait piled against Collins ' shack , -- the meat which he intended to poison and strew all across the range as soon as he had finished taking up his traps . On the sixth night Shady found that the whole of the great stack of meat had entirely vanished and near morning she returned without food . Breed 's strength had flowed steadily back to him and he craved meat . By noon his hunger was a hollow ache . Then suddenly he knew that there was meat two miles west of him . The wind was square at his back so he could not possibly have scented it , and any man who had seen him rise from his bed and head for meat that lay two miles downwind would have charged the act to that mysterious intuitive knowledge that animals are supposed to have . There is one sure way by which men of the open locate animal carcasses : the location of winter-killed stock or range cows mired down in an alkali bog is pointed out to them at a distance of several miles .