A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance… like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn’t care any more about anything but himself and his dying.

The line renders a human cry as something primal and hunted—an eruption of fear, rage, and refusal that collapses into a final, self-focused instinct for survival. By likening the sound to a “treed and shot and falling animal” being closed in on by dogs, the speaker frames the moment as one of total powerlessness: the victim is cornered, stripped of social masks, and reduced to raw sensation. The piling up of opposites (“surrender and defiance”) suggests a psyche oscillating between giving up and fighting back, until exhaustion produces a bleak clarity: when nothing else can be saved, the last possession is the self in the act of dying.