CHAPTER XV
THE WERWOLF
Now, as all men know, Bill Carmody had done a most foolish and insane thing.
But the very audacity of his act—and the god of chance—favored him, for as the axe whizzed through the air the keen edge of the whirling bit caught one of the larger wolves full on the side of the head.
There followed the peculiar, dull scrunching sound that stands alone among all other sounds, being produced by no other thing than the sudden crush of a living skull.
The front and side of the skull lifted and turned backward upon its hinge of raw scalp and the wolf went down, clawing and biting, and over the snow flowed thick red blood, and a thicker mucus of soft, wet brains.
At the sight and scent of the warm blood, the companions of the stricken brute—the gaunt, tireless leaders, who had traveled beside him in the van, and the rag-tag and bobtail alike—fell upon him tooth and nail, and the silence of the forest was shattered by the blood-cry of the meat-getters.
Not so the great she-wolf, who despised these others that fought among themselves, intent only upon the satisfaction of their hunger.
Her purpose in trailing this man to destruction was of deep vengeance: the assuagement of an abysmal hatred that smoldered in her heart against every individual of the terrible man kind, whose cruel traps of iron, blades of steel, and leaden bullets had made her a monstrous, sexless thing, feared and unsought by mating males, hated of her own breed.