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Updated: May 14, 2025
The owl's first rush keeled Baree over, and for a moment he was smothered under the huge, outspread wings, while Oohoomisew pinioning him down hopped for a claw hold with his one good foot, and struck fiercely with his beak.
One blow of that beak anywhere about the head would have settled for a rabbit, but at the first thrust Oohoomisew discovered that it was not a rabbit he was holding under his wings. A bloodcurdling snarl answered the blow, and Oohoomisew remembered the lynx, his lost foot, and his narrow escape with his life.
His feathers ruffled up until he was like a ball. His almost sightless eyes glowed like two bluish pools of fire. Ten feet away, Baree stopped for a moment and licked his wound. Oohoomisew waited cautiously. Again Baree advanced, passing within six feet of the bush. With a swift hop and a sudden thunder of his powerful wings the great owl was upon him.
Now that he had fought the wolfish rage out of him in his battle with Oohoomisew, the dog part of him had come into its own again the lovable half of him, the part that wanted to snuggle up near something that was alive and friendly, small odds whether it wore feathers or fur, was clawed or hoofed.
His jaws had passed quickly from the bone-licking to the bone-cracking age and before Oohoomisew could get away, if he was thinking of flight at all, Baree's fangs closed with a vicious snap on his one good leg. In the stillness of night there rose a still greater thunder of wings, and for a few moments Baree closed his eyes to keep from being blinded by Oohoomisew's furious blows.
The club in Bush McTaggart's hand had not killed his spirit. It had killed his fear. It had roused in him a hatred such as he had never known not even when he was fighting Oohoomisew, the outlaw owl. The vengeful animosity of the wolf was burning in him now, along with the savage courage of the dog. He did not flinch when McTaggart approached him again.
In this humor Baree came, an hour later, out of the heavy timber of the creek bottom into the more open spaces of a small plain that ran along the foot of a ridge. It was in this plain that Oohoomisew hunted. Oohoomisew was a huge snow owl. He was the patriarch among all the owls of Pierrot's trapping domain.
So old Oohoomisew, learning wisdom from experience, hunted from ambush. He would squat on the ground, and for hours at a time he would remain there without making a sound and scarcely moving a feather, waiting with the patience of Job for something to eat to come his way. Now and then he had made mistakes.
The beat of the wings was like the beat of clubs: they drove the breath out of his body, they blinded his senses, yet he continued to tear fiercely with his claws into a fleshless breast. In his first savage swoop Oohoomisew, whose great wings measured five feet from tip to tip, had missed his death-grip by the fraction of an inch.
The lynx had snapped at him but once and was gone, leaving him crippled. But the lynx had not snarled in that wolfish way, and it had not hung on. A thousand and one nights Oohoomisew had listened to the wolf howl. Instinct had told him what it meant. He had seen the packs pass swiftly through the night, and always when they passed he had kept in the deepest shadows.
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