How long?
For days, at least, perhaps a week, that wretched buck was dying hopelessly a death that would not come.

His gaunt sides, his parched and lolling tongue, less than a foot from the snow and yet beyond reach, the filmy eye, whose opaque veil of death was illumined again with a faint fire of fighting green as the new foe came.
The ravens had picked the eyes out of the dead buck and eaten a hole in its back.

They had even begun on the living buck, but he had been able to use one front foot to defend his eyes; still his plight could scarce have been more dreadful.

It made the most pitiful spectacle Rolf had ever seen in wild life; yes, in all his life.

He was full of compassion for the poor brute.