The Voice of the Pack

by Edison Marshall

So intent was he that his keen senses didn't detect the fact that there was a curious echo to the girl's footsteps. Dan Failing had slipped down from his terrified horse and was running up the trail behind her, praying that he could be in time.

Snowbird heard the pat, pat of his feet; but at first she did not dare to hope that aid had come to her. She had thought of Dan as on the far-away marshes; and her father, the only other living occupant of this part of the Divide, might even now be lying dead in his house. In her terror, she had lost all power of interpretation of events. The sound might be the cougar's mate, or even the wolf pack, jealous of his game. Sobbing, she hurried on into Whisperfoot's ambush.

Then she heard a voice, and it seemed to be calling to her. "Snowbird—I'm coming, Snowbird," a man's strong voice was shouting. She whirled with a sob of thankfulness.

At that instant the cougar sprang.

Terrified though she was, Snowbird's reflexes had kept sure and true. Even as the great cat leaped, a long, lithe shadow out of the shadow, her finger pressed back against the trigger of her pistol. She had been carrying her gun in front of her, and she fired it, this last time, with no conscious effort. It was just a last instinctive effort to defend herself.

One other element affected the issue. She had whirled to answer Dan's cry just as the cougar left the ground. But she had still been in range. The only effect was to lessen, in some degree, the accuracy of the spring. The bullet caught the beast in mid-air; but even if it had reached its heart, the momentum of the attack was too great to be completely overcome. Snowbird only knew that some vast, resistless power had struck her, and that the darkness seemed to roar and explode about her.

Hurled to her face in the trail, she did not see the cougar sprawl on the earth beside her. The flame in the lantern almost flicked out as it fell from her hand, then flashed up and down, from the deepest gloom to a vivid glare with something of the effect of lightning flickering in the sky. Nor did she hear the first frenzied thrashing of the wounded animal. Kindly unconsciousness had fallen, obscuring this and also the sight of the great cat, in the agony of its wound, creeping with broken shoulder and bared claws across the pine needles toward her defenseless body.

But the terrible fangs were never to know her white flesh. Some one had come between. There was no chance to shoot: Whisperfoot and the girl were too near together for that. But one course remained; and there was not even time to count the cost. In this most terrible moment of Dan Failing's life, there was not even an instant's hesitation. He did not know that Whisperfoot was wounded. He saw the beast creeping forward in the weird dancing light of the fallen lantern, and he only knew that his flesh, not hers, must resist its rending talons. Nothing else mattered. No other considerations could come between.

It was the test; and Dan's instincts prompted coolly and well. He leaped with all his strength. The cougar bounded into his arms, not upon the prone body of the girl. And she opened her eyes to hear a curious thrashing in the pine needles, a strange grim battle that, as the lantern flashed out, was hidden in the darkness.

And that battle, in the far reaches of the Divide, passed into a legend. It was the tale of how Dan Failing, his gun knocked from his hands as he met the cougar's leap, with his own unaided arms kept the life-giving breath from the animal's lungs and killed him in the pine needles. Claw and fang and the frenzy of death could not matter at all.