Ned would have been removed from Doomsdorf’s power in one swiftly passing instant, the wilderness forgetting the sound of his snowshoes in its silent places. All things would be, so far as mortal eyes can discern, as if his soul had never found lodging in his body.
This was not some little fur-bearer, helpless in the trap. It was no less a creature than that great terror of the snow, a full-grown Arctic wolf, almost as white as the drifts he hunted through. Only the spruce trees knew how this fierce and cunning hunter came to snare his foot in the jaws of a marten trap. Nor could any sensible explanation be made why the great wolf did not break the chain with one lunge of his powerful body, instead of slinking into the coverts and waiting developments. The ways of the wild creatures quite often fail of any kind of an explanation; and it is a bold woodsman who will say what any particular creature will do under any particular condition. When he saw Ned’s body within leaping range, he knew the desperate impulse to fight.
None of the lower creatures are introspective in regard to their impulses. They follow them without regard to consequences. The wolf leaped with incredible speed and ferocity. The human body is not built to stand erect under such a blow: the mighty, full-antlered caribou would have gone down the same way.
The chain of the trap broke like a spring as he leaped. The steel leash that is often used to restrain a savage dog would have broken no less quickly. There was no visible recoil: what little resistance there was seemingly did not in the least retard the blow. It did, however, affect its accuracy. That fact alone saved Ned from instant death.
But as the wolf lunged toward him to complete his work—after the manner of some of the beasts of prey when they fail to kill at the first leap—an inner man of might seemed to waken in Ned’s prone body. A great force came to life within him. He lunged upward and met the wolf in the teeth.
Months before, when a falling tree had lashed down at him, he had seen a hint of this same, innate power. It was nothing peculiar to him: most men, sooner or later, see it manifested in some hour of crisis. But since that long-ago day it had been immeasurably enhanced and increased. While his outer, physical body had been developing, it had been strengthening too. Otherwise it would have been of little avail against that slashing, leaping, frenzied demon of the snow.
This inner power hurled him into a position of defense; but it would have saved him only an instant if it had not been for its staunch allies of muscles of tempered steel. For months they had been in training for just such a test as this; but Ned himself had never realized anything of their true power. He hadn’t known that his nerves were as finely keyed as a delicate electrical instrument, so that they might convey the commands of his brain with precision and dispatch. He suddenly wakened to find himself a marvelous fighting machine, with certain powers of resistance against even such a foe as this.
A great surge of strength, seemingly without physical limitation, poured through him. In one great bound he overcame the deadly handicap of his own prone position, springing up with terrible, reaching, snatching hands and clasping arms. Some way, he did not know how, he hurled that hundred pounds of living steel from his body before the white fangs could go home.
But there was not an instant’s pause. Desperate with fury, the wolf sprang in again,—a long, white streak almost too fast for the eye to follow. But he did not find Ned at a disadvantage now. The man had wrenched to one side to hurl the creature away, but he had already caught his balance and had braced to meet the second onslaught. A white-hot fury had descended upon him, too—obliterating all sense of terror, yielding him wholly to such fighting instincts as might be innate within him. Nor did they betray him, these inner voices. They directed the frightful power of his muscles in the one way that served him best.
Ned did not wait to catch the full force of that blow. His powerful thighs, made iron hard in these last bitter weeks, drove him out and up in an offensive assault. His long body seemed to meet that of the wolf full in the air. Then they rolled together into the drifts.