the mother. He knew that any strength that had come would
only feed her hostility so far; that a man was not to win the
confidence of a great mammal thing like this in a day. His first
impulse was to silence the kittens with a gourd of water, but he could
not bear to make the mother wait.

She raised her head against him as before, but the smell of the water
caught and altered her fury more swiftly this time. Skag saw the glare
go out from the great eye as the tortured mouth was cooled; and now the
hope grew within him that the tigress might actually be saved. He
talked softly to her as he poured drop by drop upon her tongue from the
side--the little ones pressing closer and closer. Even in the
convulsive trembling that took her body from time to time there was an
inflowing rather than the ebb of strength.

Presently he left her long enough partly to fill the big gourd for the
babies. He had scarcely drawn back before the first was at the edge.
Lapping was not enough for this infant. He wanted to cover himself;
apparently to overturn the dish upon himself. The others helped to
balance the gourd for a moment or two, but the massed effort became too
furious and over it went among them. Skag laughed. Only a portion was
wasted, for the kittens followed the little streams on the rock,
tonguing them as they moved and filled. He tried them again, only
covering the bottom of the gourd, but it was as swiftly overturned.
Still the young had drunk enough presently and went to tearing at the
meat in the deeper shadows.

Skag went back to the mother, still using the canteen for her.
Alternately now he dropped the water upon the wound in her shoulder.
There were hours of work here to soften the fever crust and establish
drainage. Some time afterward this work was stopped abruptly by the
warning of Nels at the door. Skag stood his canteen against a rock and
hurried forth. Nels stood at the mouth of the lair, his head turned up
the river bed. His eyes did not alter from their look of fixity as the
man emerged. The shoulder nearest Skag merely twitched a trifle, the
left paw lifting to the toes. Skag followed the Dane's eyes.

The great male himself stood stock-still in the centre of the river
bed, the carcass of a lamb having dropped from his mouth. So strange,
so vast and still, the picture, that it seemed dreamlike; the great,
round, sunny eyes unwinking--serious rather than savage--a dark-banded
thing of gold i