Once, too, I struck high, and the cat caught my right wrist between his savage teeth and tore out a piece. Was he invulnerable? I began actually to believe so—to fancy that, after all, it must be a hideous dream.
You may imagine from that into what a state my mind had come. But still I plied the knife, and still with cramped and trembling arm held off the creature’s jaws.
And then, on a sudden, a great wave of joy swept over me, and I yelled madly. The curving claws, set deep in my back and breast, relaxed. It was only the least bit in the world, but I could feel the exquisite pain of that slight withdrawal; and in another instant they came out altogether, and my foe fell limp upon the rocks beside me, where he never moved again.
I looked at him once; my eyes grew dim, and I fell across him.
When I recovered consciousness, we were lying in a heap, wet with our common blood. I crawled a couple of feet to the brook, and the icy water revived me, so that at last I could rise and limp about the field of our strange battle.
The cat was a mass of wounds; and as I counted the eleven fatal thrusts, I marvelled at his vitality and pluck—and very heartily respected them, too. Any one of ten of them would have finally killed him, but he had kept his hold to the very last, which had sunk deep into his heart.
And such a small beast to attack the lord of creation! I do not think he weighed over thirty pounds; but what a model of compact strength and agility! His skin was so slashed as to be absolutely unsavable; but I kept his scalp a long time, till the moths destroyed it.
As for myself, I was in little more attractive shape than he. Of my stout duck coat and trousers only the right half remained. My duck vest and heavy flannel shirt boasted little but a few shreds two-thirds of the way around my body. I was half-naked, and my breast, back, left side and left thigh were laced with deep, bleeding gashes.
There is only one thing about that day which I do not remember; and that is, how I got back that ten miles to camp. But somehow I got there; for when I awoke next morning, very weak and stiff—for of all wounds I know of none so painful as those inflicted by a cat—I was under my roof of birch bark, and a spotted scalp lay on the sand beside me.