With twenty years of life behind her, she struggled now for a last few seconds.

She stopped Neewa close to a thick cedar, and as she had done many times before she commanded him to climb it.

Just once her hot tongue touched his face in a final caress.

Then she turned to fight her last great fight.
Straight into the face of Challoner she dragged herself, and fifty feet from the spruce she stopped and waited for him, her head drooped between her shoulders, her sides heaving, her eyes dimming more and more, until at last she sank down with a great sigh, barring the trail of their enemy.

For a space, it may be, she saw once more the golden moons and the blazing suns of those twenty years that were gone; it may be that the soft, sweet music of spring came to her again, filled with the old, old song of life, and that Something gracious and painless descended upon her as a final reward for a glorious motherhood on earth.
When Challoner came up she was dead.
From his hiding place in a crotch of the spruce Neewa looked down on the first great tragedy of his life, and the advent of man.