The dogs all knew him well enough to let him handle them. There was not one of the five that would not have followed anybody who carried a gun. So his one-man hunt was organised. He and the five hounds made for the ridge where, two days before, Whitefoot had been caught. From reading nature-faked tales of rattlesnakes, Zeb argued that the slain fox’s mate would be haunting the scene of her spouse’s death. It was a pretty theory; as pretty as it was asinine. Like many another wholly idiotic premise it led to large results—of a sort. As Zeb was traversing a wooded gully on the way to the ridge, the foremost hound gave tongue. The pack had come to the spot where Pitchdark had been crippled. From that point a blind mongrel puppy could have followed the pungent trail. Oblivious of Harlow, for whom they had all a dog’s amusedly tolerant contempt for an inefficient human leader, the quintet swept away on the track. Zeb made shift to follow as best he could. Not being a woodsman, his progress was slow. Up the gully they roared and out into the hillside birch woods beyond and thence to the patch of broken ground over which Ruff had carried Pitchdark so tenderly. The scent was rankly strong now. It was breast-high. No longer was there need to work with nostrils to earth. The dragging hindfeet of the vixen were easier to follow than an aniseseed lure. Out into the cleared space they swung—the clearing with the ten-foot cliff behind it. There, not fifty yards in front of them, clearly visible between the braced legs of a shimmering gold-and-white collie on guard at the niche opening, crouched their prey. Deliriously they rushed to the kill. The kill was there. But so was the killer. Perhaps there are two foxhounds on earth which together can down a normal collie. Assuredly there is no one foxhound that can hope to achieve the deed. Most assuredly such a hound was not the half-breed black-and-yellow leader of that impromptu pack. The black-and-yellow made for the niche, a clean dozen lengths ahead of his nearest follower. Blind to all but the lust of slaughter, he dived between the braced legs of the movelessly-waiting collie, and struck for the cowering vixen. Ruff drove downward at him as the hound dived. The collie’s terrible jaws clamped shut behind the base of the leader’s skull. The aim, made accurate by a thousand snaps at fleeing rabbits and rising birds, was flawless. The jaws had been strengthened past normal by the daily grinding of bony food. Ruff tossed high his head. The black-and-yellow was flung in air and fell back amid his onrushing fellows; his neck broken, his spinal cord severed. But that was Ruff’s last opportunity for individual fighting. The four following hounds were upon him; in one solid battling mass. Noting their leader’s fate they did not make the error of trying to jostle past to the vixen. Instead, they sought to clear the way by flinging themselves ravenously on her solitary guard. The rest was horror.