The triumph that he had felt the first hour of the hunt was quite dead in him now. He would have welcomed any kind of prey. Just before dawn he had come upon a porcupine; but even this unprepossessing game had escaped him. It didn’t make a story that he would care to tell to his cubs. There is a certain legend, in the forest, regarding those who cannot catch a porcupine. “When Quill-back escapes the hunter,” the saying goes, “the buzzards will be full-fed to-morrow.” The meaning is wholly simple to one who knows porcupines and buzzards. There is no more awkward, stupid, guileless creature in the woods than Quill-back, and the only reason why the beasts of prey haven’t wiped out his breed centuries ago is because he is so fiendishly awkward to kill and eat. One spine in the nose means days of agony, a few in the mouth is apt to bring on slow starvation. And when one hunts porcupines, and they escape him, it means simply that the hunter is getting so old and so stiff that the scavengers may dine upon him very soon. In this case Quill-back crept up a tree and crawled out to the end of a limb where Broken Fang couldn’t get him. There was no more magnificent slayer in the whole woods than this huge puma, yet he had gone for a full day without food. And it was not to be wondered at that—just before dawn—the blood leaped in his veins anew when he caught the smell of the sheep flock on the wind. He had killed sheep in plenty in his time, only on the far eastern border of his range. He hadn’t known that any were to be found in this part of Smoky Land. They were an easy game to kill, dying at one little touch to the head or shoulder, and offering no sport at all to a bold hunter of deer. Yet to-night he was in no mood to be discriminating. And it was wholly possible that the smell of that flock seemed to grant a new lease of life. To linger at the outskirts of the band, to kill when he chose, perhaps even to know that most terrible of all wilderness lusts,—the feast of death. All forest creatures know this feast: they have an inborn passion for it that simply must almost tear them in twain. In all the world of carnage and wickedness there is no debauch that is half so terrible, and the first laws of the forest have decreed against it. For the death-feast is not the rational, honest killing of the hunt. Rather it is the thing that sheepmen dread above all things else: a perfect orgy of slaying, not for food but from desire, the tearing-out of a hundred throats in so many seconds. Yet was not Broken Fang the monarch of the forest? What laws were there to restrain him?