Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/328

 then staggered to his feet again and pulled and tugged, jerking the trap this way and that. The pain was less severe now, because the leg had grown numb, but he was wilder than ever with terror. Blindly, with no idea of where he was going and no sense of direction, he started off again through the woods.

It was nearly midday when he heard the Airedale coming. The dog was really half Airedale, half hound, a huge, light-brown, shaggy creature, ill-tempered and powerful, the undisputed master of Sandy Jim's pack. Byng knew him and instantly recognized his voice, a short sharp yelping very different from the resonant voice of a hound. The hair bristled along the lynx's back and his curved claws unsheathed themselves, then withdrew into their scabbards.

Yet in the presence of this new danger he did not give way to panic. For two hours he had been lying quietly in the midst of a small thicket of arundinaria cane, deep in a lonely pine wood. The pain had gone out of his leg, which was now completely benumbed, and the stillness and seclusion of the spot had served to steady his nerves. Resting thus, his strength, so nearly spent in his frenzied and laborious progress through the woods, had slowly come back to him, and as his strength returned the mad terror gradually subsided. At the first sound of the