As flies gather upon a lump of sugar the famished animals now crowded and crushed and fought over the deer's body, and as they came thus together there sounded the quick sharp signal to fire from Mukoki.
For five seconds the edge of the spruce was a blaze of death-dealing flashes, and the deafening reports of the two rifles and the big Colt drowned the cries and struggles of the animals. When those five seconds were over fifteen shots had been fired, and five seconds later the vast, beautiful silence of the wilderness night had fallen again. About the rock was the silence of death, broken only faintly by the last gasping throes of the animals that lay dying in the snow.
In the trees there sounded the metallic clink of loading shells.
Wabi spoke first.
"I believe we did a good job, Mukoki!"
Mukoki's reply was to slip down his tree. The others followed, and hastened across to the rock. Five bodies lay motionless in the snow. A sixth was dragging himself around the side of the rock, and Mukoki attacked it with his belt-ax. Still a seventh had run for a dozen rods, leaving a crimson trail behind, and when Wabi and Rod came up to it the animal was convulsed in its last dying struggles.
"Seven!" exclaimed the Indian youth. "That is one of the best shoots we ever had. A hundred and five dollars in a night isn't bad, is it?"
The two came back to the rock, dragging the wolf with them. Mukoki was standing as rigid as a statue in the moonlight, his face turned into the north. He pointed one arm far out over the plains, and said, without turning his head,
"See!"
Far out in that silent desolation the hunters saw a lurid flash of flame. It climbed up and up, until it filled the night above it with a dull glow—a single unbroken stream of fire that rose far above the swamps and forests of the plains.