For three nights he had been unlucky, and tonight he had been particularly unfortunate.  Two rabbits had come his way, and he had lunged at each of them from his cover.  The first he had missed entirely; the second had left with him a mouthful of fur—­and that was all.  He was ravenously hungry, and he was gritting his bill in his bad temper when he heard Baree approaching.

Even if Baree could have seen under the dark bush ahead, and had discovered Oohoomisew ready to dart from his ambush, it is not likely that he would have gone very far aside.  His own fighting blood was up.  He, too, was ready for war.

Very indistinctly Oohoomisew saw him at last, coming across the little open space which he was watching.  He squatted down.  His feathers ruffled up until he was like a ball.  His almost sightless eyes glowed like two bluish pools of fire.  Ten feet away, Baree stopped for a moment and licked his wound.  Oohoomisew waited cautiously.  Again Baree advanced, passing within six feet of the bush.  With a swift hop and a sudden thunder of his powerful wings the great owl was upon him.

This time Baree let out no cry of pain or of fright.  The wolf is kipichi-mao, as the Indians say.  No hunter ever heard a trapped wolf whine for mercy at the sting of a bullet or the beat of a club.  He dies with his fangs bared.  Tonight it was a wolf whelp that Oohoomisew was attacking, and not a dog pup.  The owl’s first rush keeled Baree over, and for a moment he was smothered under the huge, outspread wings, while Oohoomisew—­pinioning him down—­hopped for a claw hold with his one good foot, and struck fiercely with his beak.

One blow of that beak anywhere about the head would have settled for a rabbit, but at the first thrust Oohoomisew discovered that it was not a rabbit he was holding under his wings.  A bloodcurdling snarl answered the blow, and Oohoomisew remembered the lynx, his lost foot, and his narrow escape with his life.  The old pirate might have beaten a retreat, but Baree was no longer the puppyish Baree of that hour in which he had fought young Papayuchisew.  Experience and hardship had aged and strengthened him.  His jaws had passed quickly from the bone-licking to the bone-cracking age—­and before Oohoomisew could get away, if he was thinking of flight at all, Baree’s fangs closed with a vicious snap on his one good leg.

In the stillness of night there rose a still greater thunder of wings, and for a few moments Baree closed his eyes to keep from being blinded by Oohoomisew’s furious blows.  But he hung on grimly, and as his teeth met through the flesh of the old night-pirate’s leg, his angry snarl carried defiance to Oohoomisew’s ears.  Rare good fortune had given him that grip on the leg, and Baree knew that triumph or defeat depended on his ability to hold it.  The old owl had no other claw to sink into him, and it was impossible—­caught as he was—­for him to tear at Baree with his beak.  So he continued to beat that thunder of blows with his four-foot wings.