Instinctively he knew that at the last there would be no waiting—no delay. The very minute he sank exhausted into the snow they would be upon him—the great white leader and her rapacious horde—and in his imagination he could feel the viselike clench of iron jaws and the tearing rip with which the quivering flesh would be stripped from his bones.
At midday the man placed the sheath-knife in his belt and threw away the pack. Relieved of the burden, his shoulders felt strangely light. There was a new buoyancy in his stride.
But the relief was temporary, and as the sun sank early behind the pines his brain was again driving his wearied muscles to their work.
The wolves were following close in now, and the silence of their relentless persistence filled the man with a dumb terror which no pandemonium of howling could have inspired.
His advance was halting. Each step was a separate and conscious undertaking, and it was with difficulty that he lifted his moccasins clear of the snow.
Suddenly he stumbled. The leaders were almost upon him as he recovered and faced them there in the white reach of the tote-road. They halted just out of reach of the swing of his axe, and as the man looked into their glaring eyes a frenzy of unreasoning fury seized him.
His nerves could no longer stand the strain. Something seemed to snap in his brain, and through his veins surged the spirit of his fighting ancestors.
A sudden memory flash, as of deeds forgotten through long ages, and with it came strength—the very abandon of fierce, brute strength of a man with the mind to kill.
"Come on!" he cried. "Fight it out, you fiends! I may die, but I'll be damned if I'll be hounded to death! You may get me, but you'll fight! When a McKim goes down some one pays! And if it is die—By God! There'll be fun in the dying!"
With a weird primordial scream, as the first man might have screamed in the face of the first saber-tooth, he hurled his axe among them and sprang forward, flashing the cold, gray blade of his sheath-knife!