For two days and three cold starlit nights nothing happened at the windfall.  Henri understood, and explained to Weyman.  The lynx was a hunter, like himself, and also had its hunt-line, which it covered about once a week.  On the fifth night the lynx returned, went to the windfall, was lured straight to the bait, and the sharp-toothed steel trap closed relentlessly over its right hindfoot.  Kazan and Gray Wolf were traveling a quarter of a mile deeper in the forest when they heard the clanking of the steel chain as the lynx fought; to free itself.  Ten minutes later they stood in the door of the windfall cavern.

It was a white clear night, so filled with brilliant stars that Henri himself could have hunted by the light of them.  The lynx had exhausted itself, and lay crouching on its belly as Kazan and Gray Wolf appeared.  As usual, Gray Wolf held back while Kazan began the battle.  In the first or second of these fights on the trap-line, Kazan would probably have been disemboweled or had his jugular vein cut open, had the fierce cats been free.  They were more than his match in open fight, though the biggest of them fell ten pounds under his weight.  Chance had saved him on the Sun Rock.  Gray Wolf and the porcupine had both added to the defeat of the lynx on the sand-bar.  And along Henri’s hunting line it was the trap that was his ally.  Even with his enemy thus shackled he took big chances.  And he took bigger chances than ever with the lynx under the windfall.

The cat was an old warrior, six or seven years old.  His claws were an inch and a quarter long, and curved like simitars.  His forefeet and his left hindfoot were free, and as Kazan advanced, he drew back, so that the trap-chain was slack under his body.  Here Kazan could not follow his old tactics of circling about his trapped foe, until it had become tangled in the chain, or had so shortened and twisted it that there was no chance for a leap.  He had to attack face to face, and suddenly he lunged in.  They met shoulder to shoulder.  Kazan’s fangs snapped at the other’s throat, and missed.  Before he could strike again, the lynx flung out its free hindfoot, and even Gray Wolf heard the ripping sound that it made.  With a snarl Kazan was flung back, his shoulder torn to the bone.

Then it was that one of Henri’s hidden traps saved him from a second attack—­and death.  Steel jaws snapped over one of his forefeet, and when he leaped, the chain stopped him.  Once or twice before, blind Gray Wolf had leaped in, when she knew that Kazan was in great danger.  For an instant she forgot her caution now, and as she heard Kazan’s snarl of pain, she sprang in under the windfall.  Five traps Henri had hidden in the space in front of the bait-house, and Gray Wolf’s feet found two of these.  She fell on her side, snapping and snarling.  In his struggles Kazan sprung the remaining two traps.  One of them missed.  The fifth, and last, caught him by a hindfoot.