squall that kicks the heels of the rain,
and I was midway to my feet when knocked flat on my face. At the same
instant I heard Klooch sigh, very much as a man does when you've planted
your fist in his belly. You can stake your sack I lay quiet, but I
twisted my head around and saw a huge bulk swaying above me. Then the
blue sky flashed into view and I got to my feet. A hairy mountain of
flesh was just disappearing in the underbrush on the edge of the open. I
caught a rear-end glimpse, with a stiff tail, as big in girth as my body,
standing out straight behind. The next second only a tremendous hole
remained in the thicket, though I could still hear the sounds as of a
tornado dying quickly away, underbrush ripping and tearing, and trees
snapping and crashing.

"I cast about for my rifle. It had been lying on the ground with the
muzzle against a log; but now the stock was smashed, the barrel out of
line, and the working-gear in a thousand bits. Then I looked for the
slut, and--and what do you suppose?"

I shook my head.

"May my soul burn in a thousand hells if there was anything left of her!
Klooch, the seven sturdy, blind little beggars--gone, all gone. Where
she had stretched was a slimy, bloody depression in the soft earth, all
of a yard in diameter, and around the edges a few scattered hairs."

I measured three feet on the snow, threw about it a circle, and glanced
at Nimrod.

"The beast was thirty long and twenty high," he answered, "and its tusks
scaled over six times three feet. I couldn't believe, myself, at the
time, for all that it had just happened. But if my senses had played me,
there was the broken gun and the hole in the brush. And there was--or,
rather, there was not--Klooch and the pups. O man, it makes me hot all
over now when I think of it Klooch! Another Eve! The mother of a new
race! And a rampaging, ranting, old bull mammoth, like a second flood,
wiping them, root and branch, off the face of the earth! Do you wonder
that the blood-soaked earth cried out to high God? Or that I grabbed the
hand-axe and took the trail?"

"The hand-axe?" I exclaimed, startled out of myself by the picture. "The
hand-axe, and a big bull mammoth, thirty feet long, twenty feet--"

Nimrod joined me in my merriment, chuckling gleefully. "Wouldn't it kill
you?" he cried. "Wasn't it a beaver's dream? Many's the time I've
laughed about it since, but at the time it was no laughing matter, I was
that