rcilessly, bitten through the leg.

This time, although the fox had seemed to be ignoring the foe, he
turned like a flash to meet the assault. Again, however, he was just
too late. His mad rush, the snapping of his long jaws, availed him
nothing. The mink crouched, eying him, ever just beyond his reach. A
gleam of something very close to fear came into his furious eyes as he
turned again to continue his reluctant retreat.

Again, and again, and yet again, the mink repeated his elusive attack,
each time inflicting a deep and disastrous wound, and each time
successfully escaping the counter-assault. The trail of the fox was
now streaked and flecked with scarlet, and both his hind legs dragged
heavily. He reached the edge of the smooth ice and turned at bay. The
mink drew back, cautious for all his hate. Then the fox started across
the steel-gray glair, picking his steps that he might have a firm
foothold.

A few seconds later the mink once more delivered his thrust. Feinting
towards the enemy's right, he swerved with that snake-like celerity of
his, and bit deep into the tender upper edge of the fox's thigh, where
it plays over the groin.

It was a cunning and deadly stroke. But in recovering from it, to dart
away again to safe distance, his feet slipped, ever so little, on the
shining surface of the ice. The delay was only for the minutest
fraction of a second. But in that minutest fraction lay the fox's
opportunity. His wheel and spring were this time not too late. His
jaws closed about the mink's slim backbone and crunched it to
fragments. The lean, black shape straightened out with a sharp
convulsion and lay still on the ice.

Though fully aware of the efficacy and finality of that bite, the fox
set his teeth, again and again, with curious deliberation of movement,
into the limp and unresisting form. Then, with his tongue hanging a
little from his bloody jaws, he lifted his head and stared, with a
curious, wavering, anxiously doubtful look, over the white familiar
fields. The world, somehow, looked strange and blurry to him. He
turned, leaving the dead mink on the ice, and painfully retraced his
deeply crimsoned trail. Just ahead was the opening in the log, the way
to that privacy which he desperately craved. The code of all the
aristocrats of the wild kindred, subtly binding even in that supreme
hour, forbade that he should consent to yield himself to death in the
garish publicity of the open. With the last of