Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/55

 yards ahead of him and to his left, he noticed a small black bear sitting on his haunches, his head cocked on one side, listening.

By now, the wolf chorus filled the woods. The bear ambled quickly to the foot of a young hickory and began to climb. Yet not until the danger was almost upon him did Awi Agwa realize that he faced a battle.

He faced it confidently. The wolves of the Overhills had never molested him seriously, and though he had never seen a wolf pack as large as this one, he did not expect a determined attack. It was fortunate for him that the crisis came when it did. He turned at bay in a narrow rock-bound pocket of a hillside where his rear was safe. He might have traveled twenty miles through the foothills without finding another spot so well adapted to his need; and he knew as he waited that with his wide-spreading antlers and flint-edged hoofs guarding his front and flanks, these wolves must be bold indeed to press the assault home.

He did not know or did not realize that a wolf's eye is marvelously quick to detect a wounded animal and to appraise the extent of its wound—that, as he stood at bay, his right foreleg dangled as though it were broken and that it was caked with blood. They paused in front of him for a moment; twenty-one gray, gaunt, shaggy brutes, grimly silent