Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/56

 now, red tongues lolling between long white fangs. Then, at their leader's signal, they charged.

Luck was with Awi Agwa. A loose stone slipped under the hind foot of the foremost wolf, and his leap fell short. For a fraction of a second he reared on his hind legs directly in front of the elk's lowered head, and in that fraction of a second Awi Agwa's long forward-pointing pikes ripped into him behind the ribs and disembowelled him. In an instant the thing was done; and in another instant the elk's heavy many-spiked antlers swinging to right and left crashed down upon the wolves leaping at his throat from both sides.

In the swollen shaggy neck of the giant bull there was vast power. His huge antlers, six feet long, extraordinarily massive, bristling with polished sharp-pointed tines, would have seemed to the eye of a man unwieldy weapons; but in Awi Agwa there was strength enough to wield them, and he wielded them not only with strength but with instinctive skill. And again luck played a part. In that mad whirling mêlée he could not always aim his blows but struck more or less blindly; and it was mainly chance which brought the beam of a descending antler squarely down upon the back of a she-wolf's neck just behind the skull.

She staggered ten steps and stood swaying, legs wide apart. Suddenly she lifted her head and