On the steep ascents his shoulder ached intolerably and grew strangely stiff again. It was mid-afternoon when he reached the upper end of the tributary ridge and faced the short but still steeper climb to the little grassy plateau above the great precipice; and by that time Almayne was less than a mile behind him.
Yet as the danger behind grew more imminent, recollection of it dimmed in the giant bull's mind. Something else had happened to make him forget, or almost forget, the pursuer before whom he had fled for more than fifty miles.
Half way up the ridge he had crossed the trail of an elk herd. They were his own cows, he knew, the cows which he had abandoned temporarily when Almayne's rifle shot on that first day had sent him racing away in terror to the foothills. He had paused only a moment or two to sniff at the day old tracks, but he had learned, either by sight or scent, that among them was a track which should not have been there—the track of an interloper, a rival bull.
Sudden fury swelled up in him. Thenceforward it was not his fear of the hunter that drove him on. On the heights above him there was another enemy—a usurper to be met and punished.
Two hours before sunset Awi Agwa, toiling up the northern slope of the mountain, reached the
