right foreleg doubled under him and he fell. He was up again in an instant, but the fall had reopened his wound and now a stream of blood trickled down his leg.
Again he settled to the stiff-legged walk which was the only gait allowed him by his injured shoulder. He had traveled perhaps three miles farther when he heard another sound behind him, the hunting cry of a wolf pack, a pack which had smelled blood. This time Awi Agwa failed to understand. He knew wolves and did not fear them; and neither instinct nor reason told him that the blood which these gray hunters scented was his own. Nor could he know that these wolves were of a kind that he had never seen before—the vanguard of that army of grim, gaunt, long-fanged killers who were to sweep down upon the Overhills that winter from the Northern forests already deep in ice and snow.
Nearer and nearer came the savage wailing chorus. Awi Agwa passed now through an empty forest, a forest which seemed lifeless and deserted because the deer which peopled it had disappeared. He saw no more herds of whitetails grazing in the forest glades; and he knew that the deer, smaller and far less formidable than himself, had scattered to right and left out of the path of the approaching pack. For half a mile he came upon no living thing except the common birds of the woods. Then, fifty
