r
traces, yelping and snarling and biting, while over them round-faced,
hooded men shouted shrilly and struck with their whips, and from the
sledge a white man sprang with a rifle in his hands. It was Rydal.
Under the mass of dogs Wapi, the Walrus, heard nothing of the shouts of
men. He was fighting. He was fighting as he had never fought before in
all the days of his life. The fierce little Eskimo dogs had smelled
him, and they knew their enemy. The lead-dog was dead. A second Wapi
had disemboweled with a single slash of his inch-long fangs. He was
buried now. But his jaws met flesh and bone, and out of the squirming
mass there rose fearful cries of agony that mingled hideously with the
bawling of men and the snarling and yelping of beasts that had not yet
felt Wapi's fangs. Three and four at a time they were at him. He felt
the wolfish slash of their teeth in his flesh. In him the sense of pain
was gone. His jaws closed on a foreleg, and it snapped like a stick.
His teeth sank like ivory knives into the groin of a brute that had
torn a hole in his side, and a smothered death-howl rose out of the
heap. A fang pierced his eye. Even then no cry came from Wapi, the
Walrus. He heaved upward with his giant body. He found another throat,
and it was then that he rose above the pack, shaking the life from his
victim as a terrier would have shaken a rat. For the first time the
Eskimos saw him, and out of their superstitious souls strange cries
found utterance as they sprang back and shrieked out to Rydal that it
was a devil and not a beast that had waited for them in the trail.
Rydal threw up his rifle. The shot came. It burned a crease in Wapi's
shoulder and tore a hole as big as a man's fist in the breast of a dog
about to spring upon him f rom behind. Again he was down, and Rydal
dropped his rifle, and snatched a whip from the hand of an Eskimo.
Shouting and cursing, he lashed the pack, and in a moment he saw a
huge, open-jawed shadow rise up on the far side and start off into the
open starlight. He sprang back to his rifle. Twice he fired at the
retreating shadow before it disappeared. And the Eskimo dogs made no
movement to follow. Five of the fifteen were dead. The remaining ten,
torn and bleeding--three of them with legs that dragged in the bloody
snow--gathered in a whipped and whimpering group. And the Eskimos,
shivering in their fear of this devil that had entered into the body of
Wapi, the Walrus, failed to respond to