"Ugh! ugh!" she replied, and her "yes" was as intelligible to Wilfred as Diomé's "caween." He soon found that "yes" and "no" alone can go a good way in making our wants understood by any one as naturally quick and observant as an Indian.
The squaw saw what Wilfred was trying to do, and helped him, feeble as she was, to make a sling for his foot. With the stick in his hand, when this was accomplished, he managed to hobble after Maxica and the dog.
The Cree went first, treading down a path, and partially clearing the way before him with his pole. But a disappointment awaited them. The dog led them intelligently enough to the very spot where it had unquestionably found a most abundant dinner, by the bones and feathers still sticking in the snow. Maxica, guided by his long experience, felt about him until he found two rats, still wedged in a hole in a decaying tree which had gone down before the gale. But he would not take them, for fear the owl might abandon her reserve.
"The otowuck-oho," said Maxica, mimicking the cry of the formidable bird, "will fill it again before the dawn. Wait and watch. Maxica have the otowuck himself. See!"
With all the skill of the Indian at constructing traps, he began his work, intending to catch the feathered Nimrod by one leg the next time it visited its larder, when all in a moment an alarm was sounded—a cry that rent the air, so hoarse, so hollow, and so solemn Wilfred clung to his guide in the chill of fear. It was a call that might have roused to action a whole garrison of soldiers. The Indian drew back. Again that dread "Waugh O!" rang out, and then the breathless silence which followed was broken by half-suppressed screams, as of some one suffocating in the throttling grasp of an enemy.
The dog, with his tail between his legs, crouched cowering at their feet.
"The Blackfeet are upon us," whispered the Cree, with his hand on his bow, when a moving shadow became visible above the distant pine trees.
The Cree breathed freely, and drew aside his half-made trap, abandoned at the first word that broke from Wilfred's lips: "It is not human; it is coming through the air."
"It is the otowuck itself," answered Maxica. "Be off, or it will have our eyes out if it finds us near its roost."
He was looking round him for some place of concealment. On came the dreaded creature, sailing in rapid silence towards its favourite haunt, gliding with outstretched pinions over the glistening snow, its great round eyes flashing like stars, or gleams of angry lightning, as it swept the whitened earth, shooting downwards to strike at some furry prey, then rising as suddenly in the clear, calm night, until it floated like a fleecy cloud above their heads, as ready to swoop upon the sparrow nestling on its tiny twig as upon the wild turkey-hen roosting among the stunted bushes.