together again.  The crash of their horns could have been heard half a mile away, and under twelve hundred pounds of flesh and bone the younger hull went plunging back upon his haunches.  Then was when youth displayed itself.  In an instant he was up, and locking horns with his adversary.  Twenty times he had done this, and each attack had seemed filled with increasing strength.  And now, as if realizing that the last moments of the last fight had come, he twisted the old bull’s neck and fought as he had never fought before.  Kazan and Gray Wolf both heard the sharp crack that followed—­as if a dry stick had been stepped upon and broken.  It was February, and the hoofed animals were already beginning to shed their horns—­especially the older bulls, whose palmate growths drop first.  This fact gave victory to the younger bull in the blood-stained arena a few yards from Gray Wolf and Kazan.  From its socket in the old bull’s skull one of his huge antlers broke with that sharp snapping sound, and in another moment four inches of stiletto-like horn buried itself back of his foreleg.  In an instant all hope and courage left him, and he swung backward yard by yard, with the younger bull prodding his neck and shoulders until blood dripped from him in little streams.  At the edge of the clearing he flung himself free and crashed off into the forest.

The younger bull did not pursue.  He tossed his head, and stood for a few moments with heaving sides and dilated nostrils, facing in the direction his vanquished foe had taken.  Then he turned, and trotted back to the still motionless cows and yearling.

Kazan and Gray Wolf were quivering.  Gray Wolf slunk back from the edge of the clearing, and Kazan followed.  No longer were they interested in the cows and the young bull.  From that clearing they had seen meat driven forth—­meat that was beaten in fight, and bleeding.  Every instinct of the wild pack returned to Gray Wolf now—­and in Kazan the mad desire to taste the blood he smelled.  Swiftly they turned toward the blood-stained trail of the old bull, and when they came to it they found it spattered red.  Kazan’s jaws dripped as the hot scent drove the blood like veins of fire through his weakened body.  His eyes were reddened by starvation, and in them there was a light now that they had never known even in the days of the wolf-pack.

He set off swiftly, almost forgetful of Gray Wolf.  But his mate no longer required his flank for guidance.  With her nose close to the trail she ran—­ran as she had run in the long and thrilling hunts before blindness came.  Half a mile from the spruce thicket they came upon the old bull.  He had sought shelter behind a clump of balsam, and he stood over a growing pool of blood in the snow.  He was still breathing hard.  His massive head, grotesque now with its one antler, was drooping.  Flecks of blood dropped from his distended nostrils.  Even then, with the old bull weakened by starvation, exhaustion and loss