Deep back in his fortress, Miki heard the crunch of Le Beau's feet in the snow. A few minutes later he saw the man-beast again peering into his lair.
"BETE, BETE," he called half tauntingly, and again Miki growled.
Jacques was satisfied. The windfall was not more than thirty or forty feet in diameter, and about it the forest was open and clear of undergrowth. It would be impossible for the wild dog to get away from his rifle.
A second time he went around the piled-up mass of fallen timber. On three sides it was completely smothered under the deep snow. Only where Miki's trail entered was it open.
Getting the wind behind him Le Beau made his ISKOO of birch-bark and dry wood at the far end of the windfall. The seasoned logs and tree-tops caught the fire like tinder, and within a few minutes the flames began to crackle and roar in a manner that made Miki wonder what was happening. For a space the smoke did not reach him. Le Beau, watching, with his rifle in his bare hands, did not for an instant let his eyes leave the spot where the wild dog must come out.
Suddenly a pungent whiff of smoke filled Miki's nostrils, and a thin white cloud crept in a ghostly veil between him and the opening. A crawling, snake-like rope of it began to pour between two logs within a yard of him, and with it the strange roaring grew nearer and more menacing. Then, for the first time, he saw lightning flashes of yellow flame through the tangled debris as the fire ate into the heart of a mass of pitch-filled spruce. In another ten seconds the flames leapt twenty feet into the air, and Jacques Le Beau stood with his rifle half to his shoulder, ready to kill.
Appalled by the danger that was upon him, Miki did not forget Le Beau. With an instinct sharpened to fox-like keenness his mind leapt instantly to the truth of the matter. It was the man-beast who had set this new enemy upon him; and out there, just beyond the opening, the man-beast was waiting. So, like the fox, he did what Le Beau least expected. He crawled back swiftly through the tangled tops until he came to the wall of snow that shut the windfall in, and through this he burrowed his way almost as quickly as the fox himself would have done it. With his jaws he tore through the half-inch outer crust, and a moment later stood in the open, with the fire between him and Le Beau.
The windfall was a blazing furnace, and suddenly Le Beau ran back a dozen steps so that he could see on the farther side. A hundred yards away he saw Miki making for the deeper forest.
It was a clear shot. At that distance Le Beau would have staked his life that it was impossible for him to miss. He did not hurry. One shot, and it would be over. He raised his rifle, and in that instant a wisp of smoke came like the lash of a whip with the wind and caught him fairly in the eyes, and his bullet passed three inches over Miki's head. The whining snarl of it was a new thing to Miki. But he recognized the thunder of the gun—and he knew what a gun could do. To Le Beau, still firing at him through the merciful cloud of smoke, he was like a gray streak flashing to the thick timber. Three times more Le Beau fired. From the edge of a dense clump of spruce Miki flung back a defiant howl. He disappeared as Le Beau's last shot shovelled up the snow at his heels.
The narrowness of his escape from the man-beast did not frighten Miki out of the Jackson's Knee country. If anything, it held him more closely to it. It gave him something to think about besides Neewa and his aloneness. As the fox returns to peer stealthily upon the deadfall that has almost caught him, so the trapline was possessed now of a new thrill for Miki. Heretofore the man-smell had held for him only a vague significance; now it marked the presence of a real and concrete danger. And he welcomed it. His wits were sharpened. The fascination of the trapline was deadlier than before.