Observing this, Miki gave up his idea of exploration and joined him.  They reached the shelf of the dip twenty yards from the carcass of the bull, and from a clutter of big stones looked forth upon their meat.  In that moment they stood dumb and paralyzed.  Two gigantic owls were tearing at the carcass.  To Miki and Neewa these were the monsters of the black forest out of which they had escaped so narrowly with their lives.  But as a matter of fact they were not of Oohoomisew’s breed of night-seeing pirates.  They were Snowy Owls, unlike all others of their kind in that their vision was as keen as a hawk’s in the light of broad day.  Mispoon, the big male, was immaculately white.  His mate, a size or two smaller, was barred with brownish-slate colour—­and their heads were round and terrible looking because they had no ear-tufts.  Mispoon, with his splendid wings spread half over the carcass of Ahtik, the dead bull, was rending flesh so ravenously with his powerful beak that Neewa and Miki could hear the sound of it.  Newish, his mate, had her head almost buried in Ahtik’s bowels.  The sight of them and the sound of their eating were enough to disturb the nerves of an older bear than Neewa, and he crouched behind a stone, with just his head sticking out.

In Miki’s throat was a sullen growl.  But he held it back, and flattened himself on the ground.  The blood of the giant hunter that was his father rose in him again like fire.  The carcass was his meat, and he was ready to fight for it.  Besides, had he not whipped the big owl in the forest?  But here there were two.  The fact held him flattened on his belly a moment or two longer, and in that brief space the unexpected happened.

Slinking up out of the low growth of bush at the far edge of the dip lie saw Maheegun, the renegade she-wolf.  Hollow-backed, red-eyed, her bushy tail hanging with the sneaky droop of the murderess, she advanced over the bit of open, a gray and vengeful shadow.  Furtive as she was, she at least acted with great swiftness.  Straight at Mispoon she launched herself with a snarl and snap of fangs that made Miki hug the ground still closer.

Deep into Mispoon’s four-inch armour of feathers Maheegun buried her fangs.  Taken at a disadvantage Mispoon’s head would have been torn from his body before he could have gathered himself for battle had it not been for Newish.  Pulling her blood stained head from Ahtik’s flesh and blood she drove at Maheegun with a throaty, wheezing scream—­a cry that was like the cry of no other thing that lived.  Into the she-wolf’s back she sank her beak and talons and Maheegun gave up her grip on Mispoon and tore ferociously at her new assailant.  For a space Mispoon was saved, but it was at a terrible sacrifice to Newish.  With a single lucky slash of her long-fanged jaws, Maheegun literally tore one of Newish’s great wings from her body.  The croak of agony that came out of her may have held the death-note for Mispoon, her mate; for he rose on his wings, poised himself for an instant, and launched himself at the she-wolf’s back with a force that drove Maheegun off her feet.