nd he gave up the futile race. A deer he might have overtaken, but
small game the wolf must hunt as the fox hunts it, and he began to slip
through the thickets slowly and as quietly as a shadow. He was a mile
from the Sun Rock when two quick leaps put Gray Wolf's supper between
his jaws. He trotted back slowly, dropping the big seven-pound snow-shoe
hare now and then to rest.

When he came to the narrow trail that led to the top of the Sun Rock he
stopped. In that trail was the warm scent of strange feet. The rabbit
fell from his jaws. Every hair in his body was suddenly electrified into
life. What he scented was not the scent of a rabbit, a marten or a
porcupine. Fang and claw had climbed the path ahead of him. And then,
coming faintly to him from the top of the rock, he heard sounds which
sent him up with a terrible whining cry. When he reached the summit he
saw in the white moonlight a scene that stopped him for a single moment.
Close to the edge of the sheer fall to the rocks, fifty feet below, Gray
Wolf was engaged in a death-struggle with a huge gray lynx. She was
down--and under, and from her there came a sudden sharp terrible cry of
pain.

Kazan flew across the rock. His attack was the swift silent assault of
the wolf, combined with the greater courage, the fury and the strategy
of the husky. Another husky would have died in that first attack. But
the lynx was not a dog or a wolf. It was "Mow-lee, the swift," as the
Sarcees had named it--the quickest creature in the wilderness. Kazan's
inch-long fangs should have sunk deep in its jugular. But in a
fractional part of a second the lynx had thrown itself back like a huge
soft ball, and Kazan's teeth buried themselves in the flesh of its neck
instead of the jugular. And Kazan was not now fighting the fangs of a
wolf in the pack, or of another husky. He was fighting claws--claws that
ripped like twenty razor-edged knives, and which even a jugular hold
could not stop.

Once he had fought a lynx in a trap, and he had not forgotten the lesson
the battle had taught him. He fought to pull the lynx _down_, instead of
forcing it on its back, as he would have done with another dog or a
wolf. He knew that when on its back the fierce cat was most dangerous.
One rip of its powerful hindfeet could disembowel him.

Behind him he heard Gray Wolf sobbing and crying, and he knew that she
was terribly hurt. He was filled with the rage and strength of two dogs,
and his teeth met t