softness of tread.  Batard breathed gently, very gently, and not till he was close at hand did he raise his head.  He paused for a moment and looked at the bronzed bull throat, naked and knotty, and swelling to a deep steady pulse.  The slaver dripped down his fangs and slid off his tongue at the sight, and in that moment he remembered his drooping ear, his uncounted blows and prodigious wrongs, and without a sound sprang on the sleeping man.

Leclere awoke to the pang of the fangs in his throat, and, perfect animal that he was, he awoke clear-headed and with full comprehension.  He closed on Batard’s windpipe with both his hands, and rolled out of his furs to get his weight uppermost.  But the thousands of Batard’s ancestors had clung at the throats of unnumbered moose and caribou and dragged them down, and the wisdom of those ancestors was his.  When Leclere’s weight came on top of him, he drove his hind legs upwards and in, and clawed down chest and abdomen, ripping and tearing through skin and muscle.  And when he felt the man’s body wince above him and lift, he worried and shook at the man’s throat.  His team-mates closed around in a snarling circle, and Batard, with failing breath and fading sense, knew that their jaws were hungry for him.  But that did not matter—­it was the man, the man above him, and he ripped and clawed, and shook and worried, to the last ounce of his strength.  But Leclere choked him with both his hands, till Batard’s chest heaved and writhed for the air denied, and his eyes glazed and set, and his jaws slowly loosened, and his tongue protruded black and swollen.

“Eh? Bon, you devil!” Leclere gurgled mouth and throat clogged with his own blood, as he shoved the dizzy dog from him.

And then Leclere cursed the other dogs off as they fell upon Batard.  They drew back into a wider circle, squatting alertly on their haunches and licking their chops, the hair on every neck bristling and erect.

Batard recovered quickly, and at sound of Leclere’s voice, tottered to his feet and swayed weakly back and forth.

“A-h-ah!  You beeg devil!” Leclere spluttered.  “Ah fix you; Ah fix you plentee, by Gar!”

Batard, the air biting into his exhausted lungs like wine, flashed full into the man’s face, his jaws missing and coming together with a metallic clip.  They rolled over and over on the snow, Leclere striking madly with his fists.  Then they separated, face to face, and circled back and forth before each other.  Leclere could have drawn his knife.  His rifle was at his feet.  But the beast in him was up and raging.  He would do the thing with his hands—­and his teeth.  Batard sprang in, but Leclere knocked him over with a blow of the fist, fell upon him, and buried his teeth to the bone in the dog’s shoulder.

It was a primordial setting and a primordial scene, such as might have been in the savage youth of the world.  An open space in a dark forest, a ring of grinning wolf-dogs, and in the centre two beasts, locked in combat, snapping and snarling raging madly about panting, sobbing, cursing, straining, wild with passion, in a fury of murder, ripping and tearing and clawing in elemental brutishness.