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Page 13
So old Oohoomisew, learning wisdom from experience, hunted from ambush.
He would squat on the ground, and for hours at a time he would remain
there without making a sound and scarcely moving a feather, waiting
with the patience of Job for something to eat to come his way. Now and
then he had made mistakes. Twice he had mistaken a lynx for a rabbit,
and in the second attack he had lost a foot, so that when he slumbered
aloft during the day he clung to his perch with one claw. Crippled,
nearly blind, and so old that he had long ago lost the tufts of
feathers over his ears, he was still a giant in strength, and when he
was angry, one could hear the snap of his beak twenty yards away.
For three nights he had been unlucky, and tonight he had been
particularly unfortunate. Two rabbits had come his way, and he had
lunged at each of them from his cover. The first he had missed
entirely; the second had left with him a mouthful of fur--and that was
all. He was ravenously hungry, and he was gritting his bill in his bad
temper when he heard Baree approaching.
Even if Baree could have seen under the dark bush ahead, and had
discovered Oohoomisew ready to dart from his ambush, it is not likely
that he would have gone very far aside. His own fighting blood was up.
He, too, was ready for war.
Very indistinctly Oohoomisew saw him at last, coming across the little
open space which he was watching. He squatted down. His feathers
ruffled up until he was like a ball. His almost sightless eyes glowed
like two bluish pools of fire. Ten feet away, Baree stopped for a
moment and licked his wound. Oohoomisew waited cautiously. Again Baree
advanced, passing within six feet of the bush. With a swift hop and a
sudden thunder of his powerful wings the great owl was upon him.
This time Baree let out no cry of pain or of fright. The wolf is
kipichi-mao, as the Indians say. No hunter ever heard a trapped wolf
whine for mercy at the sting of a bullet or the beat of a club. He dies
with his fangs bared. Tonight it was a wolf whelp that Oohoomisew was
attacking, and not a dog pup. The owl's first rush keeled Baree over,
and for a moment he was smothered under the huge, outspread wings,
while Oohoomisew--pinioning him down--hopped for a claw hold with his
one good foot, and struck fiercely with his beak.
One blow of that beak anywhere about the head would have settled for a
rabbit, but at the first thrust Oohoomisew discovered that it was not a
rabbit he was holding under his wings. A bloodcurdling snarl answered
the blow, and Oohoomisew remembered the lynx, his lost foot, and his
narrow escape with his life. The old pirate might have beaten a
retreat, but Baree was no longer the puppyish Baree of that hour in
which he had fought young Papayuchisew. Experience and hardship had
aged and strengthened him. His jaws had passed quickly from the
bone-licking to the bone-cracking age--and before Oohoomisew could get
away, if he was thinking of flight at all, Baree's fangs closed with a
vicious snap on his one good leg.
In the stillness of night there rose a still greater thunder of wings,
and for a few moments Baree closed his eyes to keep from being blinded
by Oohoomisew's furious blows. But he hung on grimly, and as his teeth
met through the flesh of the old night-pirate's leg, his angry snarl
carried defiance to Oohoomisew's ears. Rare good fortune had given him
that grip on the leg, and Baree knew that triumph or defeat depended on
his ability to hold it. The old owl had no other claw to sink into him,
and it was impossible--caught as he was--for him to tear at Baree with
his beak. So he continued to beat that thunder of blows with his
four-foot wings.
The wings made a great tumult about Baree, but they did not hurt him.
He buried his fangs deeper. His snarls rose more fiercely as he got the
taste of Oohoomisew's blood, and through him there surged more hotly
the desire to kill this monster of the night, as though in the death of
this creature he had the opportunity of avenging himself for all the
hurts and hardships that had befallen him since he had lost his mother.
Oohoomisew had never felt a great fear until now. The lynx had snapped
at him but once--and was gone, leaving him crippled. But the lynx had
not snarled in that wolfish way, and it had not hung on. A thousand and
one nights Oohoomisew had listened to the wolf howl. Instinct had told
him what it meant. He had seen the packs pass swiftly through the
night, and always when they passed he had kept in the deepest shadows.
To him, as for all other wild things, the wolf howl stood for death.
But until now, with Baree's fangs buried in his leg, he had never
sensed fully the wolf fear. It had taken it years to enter into his
slow, stupid head--but now that it was there, it possessed him as no
other thing had ever possessed him in all his life.
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