Jan no longer snarled.  He had no breath to waste.  He was standing to his fearsome punishment like a bulldog now.  And like a bulldog he seemed, in a heavy, dogged way, and almost to glory in the bitter thrusts he took.

Then Bill overstepped himself.  Striving to win a second bite from the one rush, he got the full thrust of Jan’s bloody right shoulder so shrewdly directed that Bill went down under it as corn under a sickle.  So far so good for Jan; and by good rights that thrust should have given him his lead to victory.  But the plain truth is Jan was too full of moose-meat.  He plunged down and forward for the throat-hold—­appreciably too late—­and lost more than blood and fur from his flank as Bill wheeled into action again without any apparent loss of poise, though he had turned completely over on the snow.

Jan breathed like a bull as he resumed the defensive; and like a bull he lowered his head with a swaying motion as though to ease his labored breathing and drain his jaws of the spume that clogged them.  He was bleeding now from more than a dozen wounds.  The frost nipped those wounds stingingly.  The hard trampled snow about his feet was flecked with blood and foam—­his life-blood, his foam.  Bill remained unscathed and to all seeming as coldly calculating as ever.

At this stage a backer of Jan (if any such reckless wight existed) might easily have booked a hundred to one against the big hound from an audience of experienced northland men, had any been there to see this wonderful fray.  It seemed a breathless business enough, with never a moment for anything like reflection.  But of a truth, as Jan swung his massive head now in a gesture which added blazing coals to the fire of triumphant hate in Bill, his mind was busy with a mort of curious things.  There were many differences between Jan and the average dog, and this illustrated one of them.  As he stood heavily swaying to Bill’s lightning attacks, he saw pictures in his busy mind through a mist of blood; pictures that made the whole business of this fight far more terrible for him than it would have been for most dogs.

The dominating picture Jan saw, and the one that kept forcing itself forward upon the screen of his imagination through and over all the others that came and went, was a picture of himself on his back in the trampled snow.  Bill’s jaws were at his throat in this picture, and his blood ebbed out, an awful tide, flooding the snow with its crimson for as far as he could see.  And then the picture moved and showed him the satisfied, triumphant Bill, walking proudly away to the camp to his regained leadership; and himself, Jan, stark, helpless, dead, in that forsaken clear patch in the woods with only the cold gleam of the aurora borealis to bear him company.

Another picture showed him the stripped framework of the moose and his own reckless feasting there with the rest of the pack, while Bill, pitilessly far-seeing Bill, watched them and abstained.  Jan saw it all now and gulped upon his bitterness as he realized how cunningly it had all been planned, and just why it was that, while his enemy seemed made of steel springs actuated by electricity, he, Jan, was heavy and clumsy as an English house-dog.