In this moment, too, Neewa seemed to sense the nearness of an appalling danger.  Two hundred yards from Challoner he stood a motionless blotch of jet against the white of the sand about him, his eyes on his mother, and his sensitive little nose trying to catch the meaning of the menace in the air.

Then came a thing he had never heard before—­a splitting, cracking roar—­something that was almost like thunder and yet unlike it; and he saw his mother lurch where she stood and crumple down all at once on her fore legs.

The next moment she was up, with a wild WHOOF in her voice that was new to him—­a warning for him to fly for his life.

Like all mothers who have known the comradeship and love of a child, Noozak’s first thought was of him.  Reaching out a paw she gave him a sudden shove, and Neewa legged it wildly for the near-by shelter of the timber.  Noozak followed.  A second shot came, and close over her head there sped a purring, terrible sound.  But Noozak did not hurry.  She kept behind Neewa, urging him on even as that pain of a red-hot iron in her groin filled her with agony.  They came to the edge of the timber as Challoner’s third shot bit under Noozak’s feet.

A moment more and they were within the barricade of the timber.  Instinct guided Neewa into the thickest part of it, and close behind him Noozak fought with the last of her dying strength to urge him on.  In her old brain there was growing a deep and appalling shadow, something that was beginning to cloud her vision so that she could not see, and she knew that at last she had come to the uttermost end of her trail.  With twenty years of life behind her, she struggled now for a last few seconds.  She stopped Neewa close to a thick cedar, and as she had done many times before she commanded him to climb it.  Just once her hot tongue touched his face in a final caress.  Then she turned to fight her last great fight.

Straight into the face of Challoner she dragged herself, and fifty feet from the spruce she stopped and waited for him, her head drooped between her shoulders, her sides heaving, her eyes dimming more and more, until at last she sank down with a great sigh, barring the trail of their enemy.  For a space, it may be, she saw once more the golden moons and the blazing suns of those twenty years that were gone; it may be that the soft, sweet music of spring came to her again, filled with the old, old song of life, and that Something gracious and painless descended upon her as a final reward for a glorious motherhood on earth.

When Challoner came up she was dead.