Out of the darkness of the humour into which he had fallen, David was suddenly flung by a low and ferocious growl.  He had stepped around a young balsam that stood like a seven-foot ghost in his path, and found himself face to face with a beast that was cringing at the butt of a thick spruce.  It was a dog.  The animal was not more than four or five short paces from him, and was chained to the tree.  David surveyed him with sudden interest, wondering first of all why he was larger than the other dogs.  As he lay crouched there against his tree, his ivory fangs gleaming between half-uplifted lips, he looked like a great wolf.  In the other dogs David had witnessed an avaricious excitement at the approach of men, a hungry demand for food, a straining at leash ends, a whining and snarling comradeship.  Here he saw none of those things.  The big, wolf-like beast made no sound after that first growl, and made no movement.  And yet every muscle in his body seemed gathered in a tense readiness to spring, and his gleaming fangs threatened.  He was ferocious, and yet shrinking; ready to leap, and yet afraid.  He was like a thing at bay—­a hunted creature that had been prisoned.  And then David noticed that he had but one good eye.  It was bloodshot, balefully alert, and fixed on him like a round ball of fire.  The lids had closed over his other eye; they were swollen; there was a big lump just over where the eye should have been.  Then he saw that the beast’s lips were cut and bleeding.  There was blood on the snow; and suddenly the big brute covered his fangs to give a racking cough, as though he had swallowed a sharp fish-bone, and fresh blood dripped out of his mouth on the snow between his forepaws.  One of these forepaws was twisted; it had been broken.

“You poor devil!” said David aloud.

He sat down on a birch log within six feet of the end of the chain, and looked steadily into the big husky’s one bloodshot eye as he said again: 

“You poor devil!”

Baree, the dog, did not understand.  It puzzled him that this man did not carry a club.  He was used to clubs.  So far back as he could remember the club had been the one dominant thing in his life.  It was a club that had closed his eye.  It was a club that had broken one of his teeth and cut his lips, and it was a club that had beat against his ribs until—­now—­the blood came up into his throat and choked him, and dripped out of his mouth.  But this man had no club, and he looked friendly.

“You poor devil!” said David for the third time.

Then he added, dark indignation in his voice: 

“What, in God’s name, has Thoreau been doing to you?”

There was something sickening in the spectacle—­that battered, bleeding, broken creature huddling there against the tree, coughing up the red stuff that discoloured the snow.  Loving dogs, he was not afraid of them, and forgetting Father Roland’s warning he rose from the log and went nearer.  From where he stood, looking down, Baree could have reached his throat.  But he made no movement, unless it was that his thickly haired body was trembling a little.  His one red eye looked steadily up at David.