He met the onrushing weight of the pack breast to breast. There was no
warning. Neither men nor dogs had seen the waiting shadow. The crash sent
the lead-dog back with Wapi's great fangs in his throat, and in an
instant the fourteen dogs behind had piled over them, tangled in their
traces, yelping and snarling and biting, while over them round-faced,
hooded men shouted shrilly and struck with their whips, and from the
sledge a white man sprang with a rifle in his hands. It was Rydal. Under
the mass of dogs Wapi, the Walrus, heard nothing of the shouts of men. He
was fighting. He was fighting as he had never fought before in all the
days of his life. The fierce little Eskimo dogs had smelled him, and they
knew their enemy. The lead-dog was dead. A second Wapi had disemboweled
with a single slash of his inch-long fangs. He was buried now. But his
jaws met flesh and bone, and out of the squirming mass there rose fearful
cries of agony that mingled hideously with the bawling of men and the
snarling and yelping of beasts that had not yet felt Wapi's fangs. Three
and four at a time they were at him. He felt the wolfish slash of their
teeth in his flesh. In him the sense of pain was gone. His jaws closed on
a foreleg, and it snapped like a stick. His teeth sank like ivory knives
into the groin of a brute that had torn a hole in his side, and a
smothered death-howl rose out of the heap. A fang pierced his eye. Even
then no cry came from Wapi, the Walrus. He heaved upward with his giant
body. He found another throat, and it was then that he rose above the
pack, shaking the life from his victim as a terrier would have shaken a
rat. For the first time the Eskimos saw him, and out of their
superstitious souls strange cries found utterance as they sprang back and
shrieked out to Rydal that it was a devil and not a beast that had waited
for them in the trail. Rydal threw up his rifle. The shot came. It burned
a crease in Wapi's shoulder and tore a hole as big as a man's fist in the
breast of a dog about to spring upon him f rom behind. Again he was down,
and Rydal dropped his rifle, and snatched a whip from the hand of an