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His mate, a size or two smaller, was barred with brownish-slate colour and their heads were round and terrible looking because they had no ear-tufts. Mispoon, with his splendid wings spread half over the carcass of Ahtik, the dead bull, was rending flesh so ravenously with his powerful beak that Neewa and Miki could hear the sound of it.
Pulling her blood stained head from Ahtik's flesh and blood she drove at Maheegun with a throaty, wheezing scream a cry that was like the cry of no other thing that lived. Into the she-wolf's back she sank her beak and talons and Maheegun gave up her grip on Mispoon and tore ferociously at her new assailant. For a space Mispoon was saved, but it was at a terrible sacrifice to Newish.
The fate of Mispoon and his mate had taught him the priceless value of silence and of caution, for he knew now that in the world there were many things that were not afraid of him, and many things that would not run away from him.
Straight at Mispoon she launched herself with a snarl and snap of fangs that made Miki hug the ground still closer. Deep into Mispoon's four-inch armour of feathers Maheegun buried her fangs. Taken at a disadvantage Mispoon's head would have been torn from his body before he could have gathered himself for battle had it not been for Newish.
With his little round eyes on the alert for fresh trouble he kept himself safely hidden while he watched Miki investigating the scene of battle. From the body of the owl Miki went to Ahtik, and from Ahtik he sniffed slowly over the trail which Maheegun had taken into the bush. In the edge of the cover he found Mispoon.
Mispoon hung on, rolling as she rolled, beating with his giant wings, fastening his talons in that clutch that death could not shake loose. On the ground his mate was dying. Her life's blood was pouring out of the hole in her side, but with the dimming vision of death she made a last effort to help Mispoon. And Mispoon, a hero to the last, kept his grip until he was dead.
With a single lucky slash of her long-fanged jaws, Maheegun literally tore one of Newish's great wings from her body. The croak of agony that came out of her may have held the death-note for Mispoon, her mate; for he rose on his wings, poised himself for an instant, and launched himself at the she-wolf's back with a force that drove Maheegun off her feet.
To Miki and Neewa these were the monsters of the black forest out of which they had escaped so narrowly with their lives. But as a matter of fact they were not of Oohoomisew's breed of night-seeing pirates. They were Snowy Owls, unlike all others of their kind in that their vision was as keen as a hawk's in the light of broad day. Mispoon, the big male, was immaculately white.
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