Gray Lynx went ahead. His mate, almost as large as he, and even more savage in her lightning ferocity, was at the same time more shy of approaching the habitations of man. Full of suspicions, but driven by the pangs of midwinter famine, she followed at a little distance, while Gray Lynx, stealthily, crouching close to the snow, led the way across the open to the low, snow-muffled outbuildings of the lonely wilderness farm.

He was a strange, sinister figure, this great Canadian lynx, a kind of gigantic, rough-haired cat with the big, broad, disproportionate pads of a half-grown Newfoundland pup, and hind legs and haunches grotesquely over-developed as if in imitation of a jack-rabbit. His moon face, stiffly-whiskered, and with a sort of turned-back ruff beneath the blunt, strong jaws, was indescribably wild and savage, lit as it was by a pair of round, unwinking, palely luminous eyes, and surrounded by sharp ears fantastically tufted. In color he was all of a shadowy, light gray, faintly toned on back and flanks with a brownish yellow. His grotesque but extraordinarily powerful hindquarters were finished off with a straight stub of a tail, perhaps three inches or four in length. He might, in fact, have looked like a caricature, but for the appearance of power and speed and deadly efficiency which he conveyed, the suggestion of menace in every movement.

Under the necessity of the Hungry Month, the big lynx had visited this clearing once before, prowling as near as he dared, in the first shadows of late afternoon. He had seen in the yard a couple of cows—which were too big to interest him. What was more to his purpose, he had seen some huddling sheep. Then a draft of icy air blowing from the direction of the house had borne to his nostrils the dreaded scent of man, and he had slunk off hurriedly to his coverts. But those sheep! The smell of them, the remembered relish of a lamb which he had once devoured in the thickets, stung his appetite to madness. Like most of the wild creatures, he had learned, either from instinct or experience, that man was less to be dreaded by night than by day. So, well after nightfall, he had returned to the farm, bringing his ravenous mate with him.

At one side of the yard, startlingly bright in the light of the low moon, stood the settler’s house; at the other side, two low, connected barns, with a shed running half-way to the house. The long, black shadows of the buildings stretched nearly across the open space, between the farmstead and the woods. The snow was hard packed and frozen, covered with an inch of recent and lighter snowfall, which the winds would presently come and sweep away into the fence-corners. Through the space of shadow Gray Lynx crept like a denser shadow, till he reached the corner of the nearest barn. Here he crouched, making himself as small as possible, while he took a long sniff at one of the cracks in the warped, ill-seasoned, hemlock boarding. Then he turned his head and looked at his mate, who was crouching some ten paces to the rear. As if this was a signal that all was as it should be, she ran lightly forward and crouched again beside him.

From within, besides that warm, distracting, woolly smell, came comfortable rustlings of dry hay, and sounds of chewing, and safe contented breathings. It was obvious that the sheep were in there. Gray Lynx’s eyes, piercing and impatient, searched the blank wall before him. There was no entrance from that side. Furtively he led the way round the corner, his mate still keeping a prudent distance. At the edge of the moonlit yard he hesitated. Still there was no opening. Keeping carefully in the shadow, he prowled around to the other corner of the building, but with no better luck. Then, growing more bold, he ventured into the light and crept down the front of the barn, flattening himself to the snow as he went; his mate, distrustful still, and now growing angry as she began to feel that she had been fooled, peered around the corner and watched him.

Gray Lynx was furious. He had expected to see those sheep still huddled in the yard. Finding that they were inside the barn, he then expected to get in among them by the same way they themselves had entered. Where such fools as sheep could, surely he could go. He knew nothing of doors that closed and opened, so he was puzzled. He drew back and stared up at the roof. Assuredly, the sheep must have got in by way of the roof. He could see no opening up there, however, so he went prowling around the other barn and the shed as well, finding everything shut up tightly against the biting cold. Then he came again to his mate, who was now awaiting him, tail and whiskers twitching with ill-humor, in the shadow behind the first barn.

But Gray Lynx was not yet ready to acknowledge defeat. The roof of the shed was lower than that of the barns. With a tremendous leap he gained it, but only to fall back ignominiously beneath a mass of snow which his claws had disengaged. At the next attempt, however, he got a grip with his front paws upon the roof itself, and so drew himself up, but not without a sharp noise of scraping and clawing. The sudden sound disturbed the hens, roosting inside immediately below the roof, and they set up a shrill cackling of alarm.

Gray Lynx stopped, held himself rigid, and listened with all his ears. Chickens would do him almost as well as sheep—if only he could come at them! He clawed savagely at the roof, but it was new and strong, and he speedily found that there was nothing to be hoped for by that method of procedure. Frantic with baffled eagerness, he ran along the shed and sprang with a magnificent bound to the roof of the barn. At the thud of his landing the cattle stirred and snorted uneasily, and the two horses whinnied with anxious interrogation.

At this instant a window in the farmhouse flew up with a clatter. Gray Lynx turned his flat, cruel face sharply toward the sound. He saw a jet of flame spurt from the window; a crashing thunder shocked his ears, and something hummed viciously close above his head. Fortunately for him, the light of the moon is a deceptive light to shoot by. He left no chance, however, for the settler to try a second shot. With one wild leap he cleared the roof and alighted on the snow behind the barn. He saw his mate already fleeing, and he followed in long, panic-stricken bounds.

Well within the shelter of the woods, Gray Lynx found his mate awaiting him. She stood with her head turned back over her shoulder, eying him dangerously. What she conveyed to him by that look is not with any certainty to be recorded; but it seemed to be unpleasant in its drift, for Gray Lynx turned aside, in a casual way, and pretended to sniff interestedly at the day-old trail of a rabbit. It was difficult, however, to assume an interest for any length of time in anything so hopelessly uninteresting. After a few seconds he wandered off stealthily, in search of some fresher trail. His mate, though hot with scorn and disappointment, ranged along within a few leaps of him. In such a famine season it was to the interest of both that they should hunt together, so far as their morose and distrustful natures made it possible.

The stillness of death itself lay on the forest. The very air seemed brittle under the intense cold. The glare of the unclouded moon was glassy, hard, implacable. It seemed to devitalize even the strong, stealthy forms of the gliding lynxes, to change them into a pair of drifting ghosts, which turned their heads from side to side as they went, and flashed from their eyes a pale, blasting fire.

But Gray Lynx had a very unghostly hunger—as had also his mate. Suddenly his unerring eyes detected, under a spreading hemlock, a spot where the snow had been disturbed. To a less keen vision it would have been nothing, but to Gray Lynx it was a clear, unmistakable indication. Swerving sharply from his trail, he pounced upon the little roughness in the snow, and began digging furiously with his forepaws. In a moment he was half buried, for the snow, here in the shelter of the trees, lay softer than in the wind-beaten fields. Sniffing his way by his well-instructed nose, he followed a deep trail which led in toward the trunk of the hemlock. His mate, meanwhile, drew near and watched enviously. A moment more and his head emerged amid a swirl of fluttering wings and flying snow. In his jaws he held a big cock-grouse. The unhappy bird had buried himself in the snow for the night, that he might sleep more warmly than on his roost among the branches. For a second more his strong wings flapped spasmodically, then Gray Lynx crunched the life out of him and fell to his meal.

The ill-humored female crept nearer, crouching with a conciliatory air. But Gray Lynx was not of a gallant or chivalrous tribe, and a single cock-grouse is not half a meal for a starving lynx. With a strident snarl he thrust out one great paw in warning. The female stopped, licked her lips hungrily, then turned like lightning and ran up a neighboring fir-tree. Her ears had caught the sound of a startled twitter which had answered Gray Lynx’s snarl. There were snow-buntings resting in that tree. Her iron claws, however, clutching at the bark, announced her coming, and for all her speed the birds escaped her, hopping up with terrified outcry to the topmost slender branches, where she could not go. Smarting with disappointment, she descended the tree, and continued her prowl at a distance of some twenty paces from her selfish partner, who had by this time finished up the grouse.

For perhaps half an hour nothing more happened, and the temper of Gray Lynx’s mate grew momently more dangerous. It was bad enough to be so hungry as she was, but to be first led into a trap by Gray Lynx and then to see him make a meal before her eyes, this was hardly to be borne. All at once she gave a great leap to one side, turning in the air as she sprang, and came down, with forepaws outstretched and claws wide spread, just at the edge of a snow-draped bush. Out of the corner of her eye she had seen a wood-mouse. With her miraculous speed of action, as of a mighty spring unloosed, she had caught the tiny victim just as it was vanishing under the refuge. It made but one mouthful, to be sure, but it was quite as good as a snow-bunting would have been. She licked her chops, gave Gray Lynx a sidelong look, and crept on.

Slowly the moon rolled up the vitreous sky, shortening the shadows of tree and stump. The forest was more open here, having been recently gone over by the lumbermen. Dense thickets, single trees, ranks of stumps, aisles and colonnades of tall second growth, not yet quite heavy enough for the woodsman’s axe, succeeded each other in bewildering confusion. By and by, from a hemlock stump just ahead but hidden by some bushes, came a crisp sound of gnawing. Both lynxes crouched flat, their absurd tails twitching. Then, separating so that one should go to each side of the clump of bushes, they crept upon the heedless gnawer. As they came in sight of him, they stopped. It was a big porcupine, fat, warmly clad, and indifferent alike to foe and frost.

Full well the lynxes knew that this was no quarry for their hunting. But they could not help dallying with the temptation. They stole nearer, their mouths watering. The porcupine went on gnawing the dry hemlock; but when the lynxes were come within a few feet of him, he stopped, put his nose between his forepaws, and erected his needle-pointed quills, till there was nothing of him to be seen but this threatening array. The lynxes crouched flat, and eyed him longingly. At last the female, her hunger getting the better of her discretion, stole closer and reached out a prying nose, as if hoping to find some weak point in the scornful rodent’s defences. Gray Lynx snarled a warning; but in that same instant the porcupine’s tail—a massive member covered with tiniest needles—jerked sharply and just brushed the intruding muzzle. With a spitting yowl, the lynx jumped backward, two or three slender quills sticking in her nose like pins in a cushion. Paw and rub and wallow as she might, she could not get them out, for their barbed edges held inexorably. All she could do was break them, and go on, with the points rankling like wasp-stings in her tender muzzle. From time to time she would plunge her face in the snow, to allay the torment. And her temper was by no means improved.

All this, however, troubled Gray Lynx not at all. To be sure, the mishap to his mate had cooled his longing for porcupine meat, and he had resumed his quest of safe hunting. But concern for the female’s sufferings never entered into his savage heart. She was of importance to him only if they should find some big game—a strayed sheep or a doe, for instance—which they could bring down more surely and more quickly by acting in combination. There was none of that close and firm intimacy which so often appears to exist between the male and female wolf.

In traversing an alley of big spruce stumps, the two came close together, though they continued to pay each other not the slightest attention. A light, dull pad-pad struck their ears, and both crouched flat. In the next instant a white rabbit shot past them, almost brushing their noses. His great, simple eyes starting from his head with terror, he went by at such a pace that there was no time to strike him down, though the female, who was the farthest from him, made a futile swipe at him with one paw. It was clear that something deadly must be following the rabbit, to cause him such blind panic. Whatever it might be, the lynxes had no fear of it. They wanted it. And they waited for it.

And the next moment it came.

It came running soundlessly, nose up on the hot scent, a slim, low, long-bodied, sinuous white beast, with a sharp-pointed head and eyes like two drops of liquid fire. As it shot past him, Gray Lynx made a stroke at it and missed. But in the next fraction of a second the female had pounced. She caught the weasel, with both paws, in mid-leap. Indomitable, it writhed up and fixed its long, fine teeth in her nose. Then her fangs closed about its slender loins, and the fierce life was crunched out of it. With the blood streaming from her nose—which eased, however, for a moment the galling ache of the porcupine barbs—she fell to her meat, growling harshly over it. Gray Lynx, perhaps persuading himself that he had helped at the hunting of this quarry, demanded a share, and seized one of the weasel’s hind legs in his teeth. But with a snarl the female struck at him, clawing viciously the side of his head. He was in no anxiety to force matters with so redoubtable an adversary, so, spitting indignantly, he drew off and sat down on his haunches to watch the feast.

The feast was brief. For, though the weasel was a fairly large one, it was by no means so large as the lynx’s hunger. Still, when she had finished, and passed her great paw over her face and licked her chest clean of blood, she might have felt fairly comfortable but for that inexorable anguish in her nose.

Not long after this another rabbit bounded forth from a thicket just ahead, and darted straight between them. Both sprang at it, simultaneously, but each balked the other; and the rabbit, stretched out into a tense, white line of flying fur, shot unscathed from under their claws. Gray Lynx, as it chanced, had been the nearest to the quarry. Choosing to think that he would have made a kill had his mate’s interference not thwarted him, he gave vent to his wrath in a buffet, which caught her on the flank and sent her rolling over on the snow. Recovering herself, she faced him for a moment or two with eyes that flamed green, half minded to fly at his throat. Then, thinking better of it, she turned away and fell to nosing a mouse trail.

The trail was none too fresh, but neither was it hopelessly stale. She chose to follow it. Thereupon Gray Lynx, hopeful of something worth while, stole nearer to see what she might be trailing.

Now, it chanced that in this particular neighborhood a trapper had been busy. A morsel of frozen fish lay upon the snow. Both prowlers saw it at the same time, and pounced for it. But it was Gray Lynx who reached it first, and he bolted it in one mouthful, while his mate snarled with rage. Sniffing about for other possible fragments, he stepped to one side. There was a muffled click beneath the surface of the snow. Straightway Gray Lynx, doubling himself like a full-drawn bow, and ripping out a screech of panic, sprang into the air, with a steel trap hanging to his left forepaw.

The trap was attached by a chain to a solid wooden balk, too heavy for Gray Lynx to drag. Biting savagely at the strange horror which had clutched him, yowling and spitting, and rolling head over heels, he lost his wits entirely in the madness of his efforts to escape. For a moment the female shrank back, with flattened ears and narrowed eyes, frightened and bewildered. Then, seeming to imagine that there was some treachery to herself in this dreadful and inexplicable performance, she drew nearer, with a menacing growl. The next instant, as if quite beside herself at the sight of such contortions, she gave vent to a mad screech and flung herself at Gray Lynx’s throat.

In a moment the two became, as it were, one ball of clinging, tearing, screeching fur and claws. They rolled over and over in the snow, the heavy trap striking them both impartially, the chain now entangling them, now flying loose with a sharp jangle. Blood spattered in every direction, amid spurts of snow and flecks of torn fur. But Gray Lynx, hampered by trap and chain, and weakened alike by terror of the unknown and horror at the incomprehensible fury of his mate, was overmatched from the first. In a few minutes the tense ball seemed to loosen. The maniacal uproar ceased to affront the night, diminishing to a panting growl. Gray Lynx’s body straightened out. The female continued to worry it for a few moments. Then, as if suddenly coming to her senses, she stopped, drew off, eyed the mangled and twitching form, and slunk away into the nearest bushes. Here she crouched, as if in terror, and peered out fascinated. At last the shape of what had once been her mate lay quite still. Then, after a little, she crept away, hid herself in a remote thicket, and fell to licking her scars and cleansing her fur. And the outstretched body of Gray Lynx, with cruel eyes half open and staring blankly, stiffened little by little in the still, implacable frost.