where the nose begins to come up into the skull,--and he too had harried
his last deer.

Two other curs had leaped aside with quick instinct the moment they saw
me, and vanished into the thickets, as if conscious of their evil doing
and anxious to avoid detection. But the third, a large collie,--a dog
that, when he does go wrong, becomes the most cunning and vicious
of brutes,--flew straight at my throat with a snarl like a gray wolf
cheated of his killing. I have faced bear and panther and bull moose
when the red danger-light blazed into their eyes; but never before or
since have I seen such awful fury in a brute's face. It swept over me
in an instant that it was his life or mine; there was no question or
alternative. A lucky cut of the club disabled him, and I finished the
job on the spot, for the good of the deer and the community.

The big buck had not moved, nor tried to, after his last great effort.
Now he only turned his head and lifted it wearily, as if to get away
from the intolerable smell of his dog enemies that lay dying under his
very nose. His great, sorrowful, questioning eyes were turned on me
continually, with a look that only innocence could possibly meet. No
man on earth, I think, could have looked into them for a full moment and
then raised his hand to slay.

I approached very quietly, and dragged the dogs away from him, one by
one. His eyes followed me always. His nostrils spread, his head came up
with a start when I flung the first cur aside to leeward. But he made no
motion; only his eyes had a wonderful light in them when I dragged his
last enemy, the one he had killed himself, from under his very head and
threw it after the others. Then I sat down quietly in the snow, and we
were face to face at last.

He feared me--I could hardly expect otherwise, while a deer has
memory--but he lay perfectly still, his head extended on the snow, his
sides heaving. After a little while he made a few bounds forward, at
right angles to the course he had been running, with marvelous instinct
remembering the nearest point in the many paths out of which the pack
had driven him. But he stopped and lay quiet at the first sound of my
snowshoes behind him. "The chase law holds. You have caught me; I am
yours,"--this is what his sad eyes were saying. And sitting down quietly
near him again, I tried to reassure him. "You are safe. Take your own
time. No dog shall harm you now."--That is what I tried to make him feel