That fight, if it had been fair, would have been a victory for Baree, even in his youth and inexperience.  In fairness the pack should have waited.  It was a law of the pack to wait—­until one was done for.  But Baree was black.  He was a stranger, an interloper, a creature whom they noticed now in a moment when their blood was hot with the rage and disappointment of killers who had missed their prey.  A second wolf sprang in, striking Baree treacherously from the flank.  And while he was in the snow, his jaws crushing the foreleg of his first foe, the pack was on him en masse.

Such an attack on the young caribou bull would have meant death in less than a minute.  Every fang would have found its hold.  Baree, by the fortunate circumstance that he was under his first two assailants and protected by their bodies, was saved from being torn instantly into pieces.  He knew that he was fighting for his life.  Over him the horde of beasts rolled and twisted and snarled.  He felt the burning pain of teeth sinking into his flesh.  He was smothered; a hundred knives seemed cutting him into pieces; yet no sound—­not a whimper or a cry—­came from him now in the horror and hopelessness of it all.

It would have ended in another half-minute had the struggle not been at the very edge of the bank.  Undermined by the erosion of the spring floods, a section of this bank suddenly gave way, and with it went Baree and half the pack.  In a flash Baree thought of the water and the escaping caribou.  For a bare instant the cave-in had set him free of the pack, and in that space he gave a single leap over the gray backs of his enemies into the deep water of the stream.  Close behind him half a dozen jaws snapped shut on empty air.  As it had saved the caribou, so this strip of water shimmering in the glow of the moon and stars had saved Baree.

The stream was not more than a hundred feet in width, but it cost Baree close to a losing struggle to get across it.  Until he dragged himself out on the opposite shore, the extent of his injuries was not impressed upon him fully.  One hind leg, for the time, was useless.  His forward left shoulder was laid open to the bone.  His head and body were torn and cut; and as he dragged himself slowly away from the stream, the trail he left in the snow was a red path of blood.  It trickled from his panting jaws, between which his tongue was bleeding.  It ran down his legs and flanks and belly, and it dripped from his ears, one of which was slit clean for two inches as though cut with a knife.  His instincts were dazed, his perception of things clouded as if by a veil drawn close over his eyes.  He did not hear, a few minutes later, the howling of the disappointed wolf horde on the other side of the river, and he no longer sensed the existence of moon or stars.  Half dead, he dragged himself on until by chance he came to a clump of dwarf spruce.  Into this he struggled, and then he dropped exhausted.