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But his progress had been slow, and when darkness came again he was not more than eight or ten miles from the hole into which he had fallen after the Willow had shot him. Baree did not travel far this night. The fact that his wound had come with dusk, and his fight with Oohoomisew still later, filled him with caution.
With Umisk he would have played. With Oohoomisew he would have fought. At Bush McTaggart he would have bared his fangs, and buried them deep when the chance came. But the girl was different. Like the Kazan of old, he had begun to worship. If the Willow had freed Baree, he would not have run away. If she had left him, he would possibly have followed her at a distance.
This time Baree let out no cry of pain or of fright. The wolf is kipichi-mao, as the Indians say. No hunter ever heard a trapped wolf whine for mercy at the sting of a bullet or the beat of a club. He dies with his fangs bared. Tonight it was a wolf whelp that Oohoomisew was attacking, and not a dog pup.
His snarls rose more fiercely as he got the taste of Oohoomisew's blood, and through him there surged more hotly the desire to kill this monster of the night, as though in the death of this creature he had the opportunity of avenging himself for all the hurts and hardships that had befallen him since he had lost his mother. Oohoomisew had never felt a great fear until now.
Like huge fans his powerful wings churned the air, and Baree felt himself lifted suddenly from the earth. Still he held on and in a moment both bird and beast fell back with a thud. Oohoomisew tried again. This time he was more successful, and he rose fully six feet into the air with Baree. They fell again.
To him, as for all other wild things, the wolf howl stood for death. But until now, with Baree's fangs buried in his leg, he had never sensed fully the wolf fear. It had taken it years to enter into his slow, stupid head but now that it was there, it possessed him as no other thing had ever possessed him in all his life. Suddenly Oohoomisew ceased his beating and launched himself upward.
Even if Baree could have seen under the dark bush ahead, and had discovered Oohoomisew ready to dart from his ambush, it is not likely that he would have gone very far aside. His own fighting blood was up. He, too, was ready for war. Very indistinctly Oohoomisew saw him at last, coming across the little open space which he was watching. He squatted down.
But it was his ninth week before he felt his spurs and fought his terrible battle with the young owl in the edge of the thick forest. The fact that Oohoomisew, the big snow owl, had made her nest in a broken stub not far from the windfall was destined to change the whole course of Baree's life, just as the blinding of Gray Wolf had changed hers, and a man's club had changed Kazan's.
And after a moment he sat back on his haunches, sniffing the air for his beaten enemy. Then, as if defying the feathered monster to come back and fight to the end, he pointed his sharp little muzzle up to the stars and sent forth his first babyish wolf howl into the night. Baree's fight with Oohoomisew was good medicine for him.
Oohoomisew went flat on his back and for the first time Miki let out of his throat a series of savage and snarling yelps. It was a new sound to Oohoomisew and his blood-thirsty brethren watching the struggle from out of the gloom. The snapping beaks drifted farther away, and Oohoomisew, with a sudden sweep of wings, vaulted into the air.
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