ir.

The lynx was bewildered. He had fought wolves before, and with success,
leaving the marks of his claws deep in their torn and bleeding flesh;
but Kiopo's tactics were something fresh in his experience. Not only was
there more cunning, but the strength and ferocity of half-a-dozen wolves
seemed to unite in his foe's mighty frame.

On his second descent to earth, the lynx again made use of his strong
hind-quarter springs. The only difference was that on this occasion he
took care to re-bound into the air _away_ from his antagonist instead of
_upon_ him! A clear five feet he bounded from the ground, landing on the
side of a granite boulder. He was not allowed to remain. With a snarl
that was more like a roar, Kiopo hurled himself at the rock.

As the lynx pulled himself up the boulder, the wolf reached his right
flank, and inflicted a ripping wound. Screeching in rage and terror, the
defeated lynx sprang over the boulder and disappeared into the trees.

And now Kiopo, triumphant, but by no means pacified, was able to glut
his hunger upon the deer. It was the first full meal he had enjoyed for
a long time, and he was not slow to make the most of it. Usually, after
such a meal, he would have been inclined to settle himself down for a
long sleep; but in his present enraged state of mind, sleep was
impossible.

All the evening, and through the night, he traveled maddened, and
raging, devoured with the lust to kill. Woe to any living creature that
should fall across his path! Fortunately for themselves, the forest
dwellers seemed to receive mysterious signals that madness was abroad.
That night, the Spirit of the Wild Creatures did much business on the
trails. East, west, south and north, the warnings travelled. Along the
lake shore, through the decaying silence of the cedar swamps, into the
whispering glooms of the spruce woods, the voiceless tidings went.

Hunting was understood--the plain, pitiless killing for food. It meant
death, and terror, but at least it followed the ancient law of the
wilderness that one killed in order to live. But this other thing that
recognized no law, and hounded to death merely because of the madness in
its heart--this nameless Terror that seemed, in the haunted darkness, to
be everywhere at once--_this_ they shrank from, trembling, as from
something more deadly than even death itself. And so, realizing that it
was Madness and not Hunger that went hunting down the trails, the
forest-fo