A single incident broke the monotony of the daily grind.  One morning near the end of the fifth week, when the boys rode to the corral at an early hour, in order to learn the result of poison, a light kill of wolves lay in sight around the open water.  While they were attempting to make a rough count of the dead from horseback, a wolf, supposed to be poisoned, sprang fully six feet into the air, snapping left and right before falling to the ground.  Nothing but the agility of Rowdy saved himself or rider, who was nearly unhorsed, from being maimed or killed from the vicious, instant assault.

The brothers withdrew to a point of safety.  Joel was blanched to the color of the snow, his horse trembled in every muscle, but Dell shook out his rope.

“Hold on,” urged Joel, gasping for breath.  “Hold on.  That’s a mad wolf, or else it’s dying.”

“He’s poisoned,” replied Dell.  “See how he lays his head back on his flank.  It’s the griping of the poison.  Half of them die in just that position.  I’m going to rope and drag him to death.”

But the crunching of the horse’s feet in the snow aroused the victim, and he again sprang wildly upward, snapping as before, and revealing fangs that bespoke danger.  Struggling to its feet, the wolf ran aimlessly in a circle, gradually enlarging until it struck a strand of wire in the corral fence, the rebound of which threw the animal flat, when it again curled its head backward and lay quiet.

“Rope it,” said Joel firmly, shaking out his own lasso.  “If it gets into that corral it will kill a dozen cattle.  That I’ve got a live horse under me this minute is because that wolf missed Rowdy’s neck by a hand-breadth.”

The trampled condition of the snow around the corral favored approach.  Dell made a long but perfect throw, the wolf springing as the rope settled, closing with one foot through the loop.  The rope was cautiously wrapped to the pommel, could be freed in an instant, and whirling Dog-toe, his rider reined the horse out over the lane leading to the herd’s feeding ground to the south.  The first quarter of a mile was an indistinct blur, out of which a horse might be seen, then a boy, or a wolf arose on wings and soared for an instant.  Suddenly the horse doubled back over the lane, and as his rider shot past Joel, a fire of requests was vaguely heard, regarding “a noose that had settled foul,” of “a rope that was being gnawed” and a general inability to strangle a wolf.

Joel saw the situation in an instant.  The rope had tightened around the wolf’s chest, leaving its breathing unaffected, while a few effectual snaps of those terrible teeth would sever any lasso.  Shaking out a loop in his own rope, as Dell circled back over the other trail, Rowdy carried his rider within easy casting distance, the lasso hissed through the air, settled true, when two cow-horses threw their weight against each other, and the wolf’s neck was broken as easily as a rotten thread.