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Updated: April 30, 2025
He knew that the funny part was over, so ran for the woods and disappeared as a ball tossed up the snow behind him. Poor Skookum's tongue was nearly a foot long as he walked meekly ashore.
His mouth, jaws and face, neck and legs, were bristling with quills. He was sick and emaciated. He could not have lasted many days longer, and Skookum's summary lynching was a blessing in disguise. The trappers' usual routine was varied by a more important happening.
A faint sound of rustling branches, and some short animal noises in the woods had caught Rolf's ear, and Skookum's, too, for he was off like one whose life is bound up in a great purpose. "Yap, yap, yap," came the angry sound from Skookum. Who can say that animals have no language?
Skookum's first lesson was learned the duty of chasing the big animal of that particular smell, then barking up the tree it had climbed. Quonab, armed with a forked stick and a cord noose, now went up the tree.
Once he caught Skookum's tail, but the hair came out; the dog has not since swum across the pond. "Twice I have seen him like today and might have killed him with the gun, but I want to meet him fighting. Many a time I have sat on the bank and sung to him the 'Coward's Song, and dared him to come and fight in the shallow water where we are equals. He hears me. He does not come.
The surmise was quite right. Much new-fallen timber was now across the channel. They chopped over twenty-five trunks before they reached Eagle's Nest at noon, and, leaving the river in better shape than ever it was, they turned, for the swift, straight, silent run of ten miles home. As they rounded the last point, a huge black form in the water loomed to view. Skookum's bristles rose.
"There was no dew last night. I saw Tongue Mountain at daybreak; my tom-tom will not sing. "The smoke went three ways at dawn, and Skookum's nose was hot." So they rested, not knowing, but forced to believe, and it was not till the third day that the sky broke; the west wind began to pay back its borrowings from the east, and the saying was proved that "three days' rain will empty any sky."
Rolf paid no heed, but went on, bawling and drumming and staring upward into vacant space. After a few minutes Skookum scratched and whined at the shanty door. Rolf rose, took his knife, cut a bunch of hair from Skookum's neck and burned it in the torch, then went on singing with horrid solemnity: "Evil spirit leave me; Dog-face do not harm me."
A white-footed mouse, one of a family that lived in the shanty, was trying how close he could come to Skookum's nose without being caught, while Rolf looked on. Quonab was lying back on a pile of deer skins, with his pipe in his mouth, his head on the bunk, and his hands clasped back of his neck.
Again the chase was round and round, but very soon the dog was so wearied that he sat down, and now the black fox actually came back and barked at him. It was maddening. Skookum's pride was touched. He was in to win or break. His supreme effort brought him within five feet of that white-tipped brush.
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