Old Man Lynx himself was lean with famine, for the great storm had made hunting all but impossible for him. Not so much as a wood-mouse had shown its tracks on the snow for days. And there had been nothing in his rocky den save the dried and frozen bones of dinners long since past.
To surrender his supper to-night might mean starvation and actual death to him. But so it did to the wolves. It was to be a fight for life!
Now a lynx’s claws are like so many little curved swords of poisoned steel,—and he had five on each foot. He could dig at a wolf’s unprotected sides with his hind legs while his fore legs were clinging to the throat in which he would try to fasten his fangs.
The gray wolves knew all this, for Old Man Lynx visited the same Canadian wilds that they had come from. But even so, in another moment they had taken the leap—together! And there was more lynx fur flying than wolf fur—as Whoo Lee, the owl overhead, could have told you.
Just in the nick of time for Old Man Lynx, the Hired Man returned. When he heard the shrill chorus of returning wolves, he had hastened back, his great snow-shoes shuffling their way down the Old Logging Road at a speed of which he had not known them capable.
He was not thinking of Fleet Foot and the fawns. But with the barn full of cattle, it would never do to leave such beasts at large in the forest. When he heard Old Man Lynx, however, the Hired Man understood just what was going on. He had not lived in the back-woods for nothing all his days. And he decided to draw a little nearer, in the hope of getting another shot or two at the great gray terrors from the North.
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