nds to her mouth and in a voice that was soft
and plaintive and amazingly comforting to his terrified little heart,
cried:

"Uchimoo--Uchimoo--Uchimoo!"

And then he heard another voice; and this voice, too, was far less
terrible than many sounds he had listened to in the forests.

"We cannot find him, Nepeese," the voice was saying. "He has crawled
off to die. It is too bad. Come."

Where Baree had stood in the edge of the open Pierrot paused and
pointed to a birch sapling that had been cut clean off by the Willow's
bullet. Nepeese understood. The sapling, no larger than her thumb, had
turned her shot a trifle and had saved Baree from instant death. She
turned again, and called:

"Uchimoo--Uchimoo--Uchimoo!"

Her eyes were no longer filled with the thrill of slaughter.

"He would not understand that," said Pierrot, leading the way across
the open. "He is wild--born of the wolves. Perhaps he was of Koomo's
lead bitch, who ran away to hunt with the packs last winter."

"And he will die--"

"Ayetun--yes, he will die."

But Baree had no idea of dying. He was too tough a youngster to be
shocked to death by a bullet passing through the soft flesh of his
foreleg. That was what had happened. His leg was torn to the bone, but
the bone itself was untouched. He waited until the moon had risen
before he crawled out of his hole.

His leg had grown stiff, but it had stopped bleeding, though his whole
body was racked by a terrible pain. A dozen Papayuchisews, all holding
right to his ears and nose, could not have hurt him more. Every time he
moved, a sharp twinge shot through him; and yet he persisted in moving.
Instinctively he felt that by traveling away from the hole he would get
away from danger. This was the best thing that could have happened to
him, for a little later a porcupine came wandering along, chattering to
itself in its foolish, good-humored way, and fell with a fat thud into
the hole. Had Baree remained, he would have been so full of quills that
he must surely have died.

In another way the exercise of travel was good for Baree. It gave his
wound no opportunity to "set," as Pierrot would have said, for in
reality his hurt was more painful than serious. For the first hundred
yards he hobbled along on three legs, and after that he found that he
could use his fourth by humoring it a great deal. He followed the creek
for a half mile. Whenever a bit of brush touched his wound, he would
snap at it viciously