She was watching the bull, and just as she expected to hear the rifle boom Smoke growled. She turned to threaten him; there was a rattling crash of underbrush above them, and a second bull, coming apparently from nowhere, charged right on top of them.
She saw the first moose plunge into the bushes downstream as she shrieked, “My God, Dave! Drop!”
Her cry pierced the numbness of his bewilderment and he stooped, instinctively throwing up his arm. Smoke shot from the canoe, a streak of white, and leaped for the bull. He caught the moose by the throat as the big brown shape reared to drive those terrible hoofs down on the crouching David.
Swickey’s carbine jumped to her shoulder and she fired point-blank at the rearing blur of brown and white. Down it came with a clatter of antlers on the rocky shore.
David straightened up, his eyes expressing helplessness and horror. A few yards away the bull lay with his head twisted to one side. David stood stupidly watching a little red stream trickle down through the pebbles. Swickey stepped forward, glanced at the moose, and then her fingers relaxed, and the carbine clattered to the rocks as she sank down, her head drooping forward to her knees. David was shaking as he picked up a piece of driftwood and pried the fore-shoulders of the moose off Smoke. He got the dog’s hind legs and pulled him out. The bullet, with terrific energy at that short range, had ripped through the dog and into the moose, killing them both.
Smoke lay, a crushed and bloody mass, his teeth still fixed in the throat of the moose. “Smoke, old boy,” whispered David, as he knelt by him and patted his head, “you stood to your guns when I was a tottering idiot.”
He thought of the many times he had teased the dog, telling him he was “no good” and “a bother,” which Smoke had seemed to understand and accept with a cheerful wagging of his tail as if trying to say, “I know you are only joking.”
Finally he arose and went to Swickey. “Come, girl, get in the canoe. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Don’t touch that moose! Oh, Dave, Dave—”
“Damn the moose. I’m going to bury Smoke—your dog.”