Title: Beyond the Fearful Forest
Author: Krepps, Robert W.
Language: English
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                       BEYOND THE FEARFUL FOREST

                         By Geoff St. Reynard

        No hunter had ever dared to follow the great Knifetooth
            Bear into his Fearful Forest. For beyond it lay
            a greater peril--the land of _The Nameless_....

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
              Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
                              April 1951
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


_The bones lie light in the fertile soil of Sunset Fields. You can prod
them out with a few thrusts of your bare toes. The roots of the big
luxurious tree ferns carry skulls and skins and back-bones up to the
frond-filtered shining of day, and even the delicately questing purple
tendrils of the burrowflower may drag an occasional finger or toe bone
from its uneasy rest, so light they lie._

_The bones do not decay. Nobody knows why. Animal bones decay. The
skeletons of our own revered dead fall away to powder in a generation
or two. But the bones of Sunset Fields are like the unchanging granite
of the jagged cliffs, and of them we make our arrow points and lance
heads, our hammers and our needles. It is more difficult to work the
bones, to chip and flake them into form, than it is to shape our tools
of metal; for we have ways of heating and molding these, subtle methods
handed down from the far olden times of our fathers' fathers. There is
no way to heat and mold a bone._

_Our singers tell a legend that--oh, many years ago!--a man went by
stealth and slew another man with his lance. Not many of us believed
the legend even when we were children. To kill a man! Our singers say
that he possessed a beautiful woman whom the slayer desired. Who would
desire the woman of another man? Such a thing seems incredible and
childish, even to a child. There are women for all men, men for all
women, and do we not each love all others equally, reserving a special
love only for our own mate? But the legend is sung that after this
bloody deed was done, many men fought because of it, and their curst
bones lie in the earth of Sunset Fields forever, a memorial to their
fantastic stupidity._

_It is a legend of the singers. Nobody really knows why the bones do
not decay._

_Beyond Sunset Fields run the three brooks: the Gray, the Blue, and
the Crimson. Far to the south they meet, and there become the Wide
River that flows turbulently on until it reaches the silver dusk that
encircles the world. There was a man of our people who once set out to
find the end of the Wide River, but he never came back._

_Beyond the trio of brooks there rise the first grim ranks of the
Fearful Forest, line after line of tall broad-leafed trees so evenly
spaced you would think they had been planted by design. Pass the
palisades of this forest and brave its terrors, its darkness and great
angry beasts, and you will come after a time to the other side; and
there, beyond a black plain where nothing grows save crawling vines and
nauseous weed patches, you may see the towering cliffs of the country
of The Nameless...._

       *       *       *       *       *

I am a hunter. My father was a singer, and his mate also; but I have a
poor voice, good for little except to shout across the valleys to my
friends, so my father, affectionately calling me Bear-throat, counseled
me to become a hunter; and this I did.

I am strong, of course. My arms are brown as a deer's hide and they
swell with muscle. My legs are sturdy and, though not thickset, can
carry me at a run for the space of a day without tiring. I do not boast
when I say this, for after all I am a hunter and my arms and legs are
my tools as much as my lances and arrows and metal knife. My name is
Ahmusk, though I am more generally hailed as Bear-throat, the nickname
my father gave to me. I have eyes the color of Blue Brook where it runs
into a deep pool. My hair, the pale golden hue of the earliest corn of
autumn, is cut short in the fashion of hunters, falling scarcely to my
shoulders in back, in front sliced off evenly just above my eyes. And I
think this is all that need be said concerning the person of Ahmusk the
hunter.

The day of which I would speak first was a day of cheerful sun and
small breezes, with that crispness in the air that makes a man stand
tall and blink once or twice, and perhaps shout for joy. I did just
that, after I had wakened, and then I sat on the edge of my platform
and looking down the tree's trunk at the grass below I was astonished
at its bright new-seeming greenness. I sucked in a great chestful
of air and shouted again. In the tree nearest mine there were two
platforms, and now someone sat up on the higher and rubbed her eyes and
grumbled. "What is it, Bear-throat?"

"The morning, girl, the morning," I said heartily.

"Need you be a herald of the dawn _every_ day?" she asked,
mock-petulantly. And I laughed.

"Throw off your furs and smell the wind, Lora," I told her. "In the
changing of the moon to nothing and back to fulness, the snow will
fly. Today is the best day of the year."

"To you, every day is the best of the year, or at least you say so each
morning." She put back her sleeping furs and stood up, naked and young
and beautiful. "When we are mated," she said, "I will see that you wake
silently, and slide down the tree to find my breakfast while I sleep as
long as I wish!"

"What a shrew," I said happily. "What a ruler of men."

"You will see." She slipped her light garment over her head. "I will
quiet you down, young Bear-throat!"

"I hope the day is soon, then, for your mating," growled her father
from the lower platform of their family's tree. "Perhaps good folk will
then be allowed to rest."

       *       *       *       *       *

Grinning, I hung by my hands from the edge of my platform and dropped
to the ground. Fifteen feet from toe to turf is no drop at all to a
skilled hunter. The watchers were coming down the glen from their posts
of the night, yawning and rubbing their eyes. I hailed them and they
answered with waves of their arms.

"Any disturbances?"

"You would have heard, Ahmusk of the keen ears," said their leader.
"No, we glimpsed a knifetooth bear traveling his solitary way to the
Gray Brook, but if he killed thereafter we were too distant to hear
it. No noises save the small animals going and coming, going and
coming all night long."

"It is nearly a moon's change since old Halfspoor ranged near the
valley," I said. "He will be coming back soon, if I know his ways; and
then there will be disturbances in the night."

The leader of the watchers shivered. As far apart as we stood, I saw
him shudder. "But do not lose your day's sleep over him," I shouted
reassuringly. "This very moment I go to look for his track. If he
ranges within our lands I shall know, and a pair of hunters will watch
with you."

"Watching is our duty, not yours," he answered a little sullenly.
"Beware of Halfspoor, or he will be using your pelt for a sleeping fur,
Ahmusk."

I was angered, I suppose. A hunter's pride is a powerful thing.
"Halfspoor is only a knifetooth bear," I told him. "He is not, after
all, one of The Nameless."

They looked at me in horror; and then they turned and went to their
trees without a word. I felt ashamed of myself. It was an evil thing
to use that terrible name so lightly. Then Lora had clambered down
her tree and was standing near me, looking up into my face, so that I
forgot all that I had been saying and knew only that every day this
girl became more lovely.

"Good morning, Lora," I said.

"Are you really going to look for Halfspoor?" she asked me, her eyes,
that were like the purple bells of the burrowflower, all wide and
wondering.

"I am."

"Perhaps he has left our lands."

"I have known Halfspoor for five years, Lora, or it may be six. I know
his rangings and his times for killing; I recognize his track though it
be on the hardest ground, and I could tell you which snuffling grunt
was his if a full score of knifetooth bears were all talking at once.
He is due to come back today, or tomorrow or the next day. He is old
and wily, but set in his ways."

"I hope he has died on the banks of the Wide River," she said, brushing
a strand of her onyx-black hair away from her face. "I hope his bones
are gnawed by jackal-rats."

"And I hope your wish does not come true," I said lightly. "Because I
have chosen his hide for our mating rug, young Lora."

"Oh!" she exclaimed suddenly, her great eyes going wide again. "I had
forgotten to tell you. I was asleep when you returned last night."

"I trailed a wounded deer far down the Blue Brook, and caught him late.
What had you forgotten, sleek Lora?"

"The guardian Laq asked me to be his mate. It was in the afternoon, and
he asked me in the presence of my father. When I reminded him that you
were to be my mate, he asked my father for me."

       *       *       *       *       *

I was shocked, then angered above any anger I had ever known. "He asked
you, and then your _father_!" I roared. "What had your father to do
with it?"

"Laq says that in the far olden times it was the custom to ask a
woman's parents. My father was enraged and told him that we were not
living in the far olden times. Laq said it was a pity we were not,
as then the people had respect for their guardians. And my father,
fuming and rumbling until I thought he would begin to give off sparks
like Ruddy Mountain, told Laq that even a guardian had no right to ask
for the promised mate of another man. Laq then departed, saying he
would ask me again after Halfspoor had killed you, dear Bear-throat.
Halfspoor again! His cruel words had slipped my mind until I spoke them
now. Must you go looking for Halfspoor?"

"I must." Taking my bow from my shoulder, I tested it from habit, and
counted the arrows in my quiver to ascertain that there were fourteen
of them, for fourteen arrows are accounted lucky for a day's hunt. "I
do not understand Laq," I told her. "He has broken two of the strongest
customs. To ask you when you are promised ... and then to ask your
father for you, as though you were a bone hammer or a sleeping fur! Laq
must be losing his wits."

"Perhaps he was drunk on tree fern juice." She dismissed Laq and
all his works with a shrug. "The sun has lifted over the hills,
Bear-throat. If Halfspoor is so much more attractive than I am, why
then go to him, young hunter with blind eyes."

I patted her smooth cheek. "Young, but not blind. Did I not choose the
prettiest girl of all our folk, when we two were scarcely older than
sucklings?" And with this compliment, which made her preen, I left her
and walked swiftly down the glen toward Sunset Fields.

       *       *       *       *       *

By the time I had crossed Sunset Fields and come to the Gray Brook,
I had forgotten Laq and pushed Lora to the back of my mind. The day
was perfect. Every bird in the world was making merry on his twig,
every small animal had left his burrow to romp drunkenly through the
underbrush, intoxicated with the bright keen air of morning. I passed
a doe with her fawn, trotting happily toward the water; and I did not
bring her down, though she would have been easy prey and good eating,
for we shared a joy that made us sib to one another.

Still, for me the pleasure of autumn was now only a background against
which my thoughts of Halfspoor the bear marched in orderly fashion
while I reviewed them one by one. I recalled his slayings of men, his
occasional and very skillful stalking of the night watchers in their
trees at either end of our valley. I remembered how on this morning he
would be found asleep in his old lair under the two fallen petrified
tree ferns downstream near the Blue Brook, while on that morning he
would be gnawing the bones of bison or cave cat or perhaps even of
jackal-rat (for he was a dirty feeder, was Halfspoor), far up the
Crimson. I visualized his footprint, unique among knifetooth bears,
measuring as long as my arm from wrist to shoulder, and with three
outer toes gone from the right hind pug. As I waded through the Gray
Brook's chilled waters I could almost imagine that I saw the maimed
sign of his pad on the silver strand before me. "How well I know that
track!" I exclaimed to myself, with an egotistic pride in my craft;
and then I came out of the waters to find that, far from so clearly
imagining it in all its enormous crippled particulars, I had actually
been looking at the veritable track of Halfspoor himself. I was
exultant and humiliated at the same time.

Halting above it, I tested my bow once more, and counted the fourteen
bone-pointed arrows in their quiver that I had made from the paw and
forearm pelt of another knifetooth bear, my lucky quiver with the claws
still hanging from its tip. The metal knife was in its sheath at my
hip, the bone hatchet dangled from a sling handy to my left hand.
I took a deep breath and began to follow the great mutilated prints
overland toward the second of the three streams.

Soon I had crossed the Blue and was approaching the Crimson Brook.
Halfspoor was perhaps two hours ahead of me. Where he had trodden in
sand, the water had filled his track, and where he had ambled heavily
across grassy spaces, the blades had sprung nearly to uprightness
again. He was traveling slowly, inspecting logs and coverts, probably
talking to himself in the gruff complaining whine of his breed. Here
and there he had lingered a moment or two, and in these places I could
often catch a whiff of his rank ursine odor.

       *       *       *       *       *

At first I had no desire to catch up with Halfspoor. Almost would I
rather have come face to face with one of The Nameless! No hunter is
a match for a full-grown knifetooth bear, standing as he does more
than twice as tall as a man, with an unbelievable bulk that must
outweigh twenty-five humans, every ounce of which is full of fight
and choler and wickedness. His twin saber-tusks jut down in great
deadly arcs, yellow and sharp and long as a hunting arrow. His head
is larger than that of any animal, even than that of the cave cat who
lives to the north and can be heard yowling a full day's journey away.
When a knifetooth bear opens his maw it is like staring into a huge
fang-rimmed scarlet well. His paws are swift gargantuan weapons that
can enfold and crush the largest stag. Oh, a terrible beast is old
knifetooth! And Halfspoor was the biggest, the angriest, the wisest and
most hateful of his tribe.

I tracked him but did not hurry overmuch; when I had decided where
he would spend the night, I would return to the glen, and persuade a
dozen of our hunters to accompany me to find him. If he lay over a
kill, stupid and drowsy with eating, we would attack him. Some of us
might die, but Halfspoor also would die ... if we were lucky. By right
of my trailing I would then lay claim to his pelt, and from it make a
mating fur for Lora. And the watchers would feel happier as they sat
the nights through in their trees at the ends of the valley, because
Halfspoor would never trouble them again.

On this I thought as I crossed the Crimson Brook, and saw the first
line of trees rising from gray tangled thickets that marked the
beginning of the Fearful Forest. Halfspoor's pugmarks went straight
toward them. And it was then that I began to form my daring plan. The
bear was obviously going to go to ground somewhere in the woodland, and
no hunter would follow me into that dreadful place after sundown.

Why not follow him and kill him myself?

Of all the folk, I alone had killed a knifetooth bear. Truly he had
been but partially grown, and I had not deliberately stalked him to
kill; no, I had blundered on him and it had been slay or be slain. But
in that fight I had learnt much of a knifetooth's tactics, blind spots
and weaknesses. His arm was now my quiver, his hide my sleeping rug.
Halfspoor was only twice his size, at most, and surely the best hunter
of the glen was a match for him? I who could loose four arrows and
notch a fifth before the first struck its mark a hundred paces off--why
should old tribal fears and the experiences of lesser men keep me from
trying my hand at conquering this maimed brute?

I went into the dank dimness of the Fearful Forest.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is something I do not like about a deep tangled forest, and
that is the lack of sunshine. The light is green and cool, and at
intervals you will see a thin beautiful shaft of yellow spearing down
from an opening far above; but unless you come to a glade there is no
chance of catching a glimpse of the sun in its glory riding the blue
fleece-clouded sky, and without the sun I feel lonely and somehow
half-lost. It is why I would make an indifferent watcher, for they must
wake by night and sleep by day. I am a sun-worshipper of the first
order. I need its blazing all about me in order to be wholly myself.

Of all woodlands, the least lovely is the Fearful Forest. As I have
said, its trees are spaced evenly as though they had been planted by
someone in the far olden times. Their wide leaves are dark blue-green
with emerald veins running beneath the surface. Their boles are thick
and have rough hard bark, unlike the smooth-skinned tree ferns of
Sunset Fields. Between their roots orange and black mushrooms and
strange pale sick-looking fungi lurk, and crawling upward toward the
invisible sun go lichens of every hue from mauve to sanguine. Where
the branches begin there is a riot of parasitical growths, thick vines
and murderous mistletoe, climbing plants that bear huge trumpets of
orchids, every sort of disagreeable creeper that lives on the energy
of its stronger brethren. All this vile vegetation makes an almost
impenetrable roof over the whole Fearful Forest. On the ground between
the trees lie heaps of long-decayed touchwood, squat thickets of brier,
lightning-blasted limbs only beginning to crumble, and a deep soft
carpet of dead things, from the half-dissolved flora of which peer
white rib cases and gleaming, grinning skulls. The Fearful Forest reeks
of death, of murdered animals and plants, of life that is not healthy
nor productive of anything save more death.

There are trails through the depths of this dismal woodland, paths
made by bears or stags or the giant dogwolves that range in packs of a
hundred. Smaller aisles are made by jackal-rats and the other lesser
animals. Halfspoor was following a deep trench of a trail that ran
almost straight toward the opposite side of the forest.

       *       *       *       *       *

For a long while I followed this pathway, glancing at the ground
now and again to be sure the knifetooth bear had not turned off;
and my mind was oppressed against my will by thoughts of horror,
generated, doubtless, in the dreary sunless vistas about me. Indeed,
I would have gone back had it not been for the bold and idiotic plan
I had conceived, of slaying Halfspoor single-handed. Several times a
jackal-rat crossed my road, snarling at me, its scurfy brown hackles
lifted. The third such loathsome beast I skewered with an arrow out of
sheer dislike, retrieving my shaft before I passed on.

Suddenly I halted. Before me on a patch of mold lay the print of the
bear, and within its great outline was a second track, that of a man.
Another human was following Halfspoor! I was astonished. I knew where
every hunter of the glen-folk ranged today, and none should be near the
Fearful Forest. Kneeling, I stared closely at the footmark. I knew it
well, as I knew the spoor of every man in this region. Laq the guardian
was before me in the woodland.

Laq! He who had so oddly broken two of the oldest customs--say rather
immutable laws--of humanity. We are supposed to love one another
equally, and for the most part we do; reserving, as I have said,
a special love for our mates and a heightened reverence for our
guardians. But I could not feel any very powerful affection for the
guardian Laq that day. I was disgruntled and wrathful to find that he
was somewhere ahead.

Certainly he had a perfect right to be in the Fearful Forest. The
guardians passed this way with some frequency, and no hunter or singer
or watcher of the night envied them their solitary journeys ... nor
their mysterious and appalling duties at their destination!

For the guardians were the only barrier, as we all had been told from
childhood, that stood between mankind and The Nameless. The calling was
hereditary, limited to certain families. Dedicated at birth to their
lifelong task, the guardians learned their secrets from their fathers,
and imparted not a syllable of them to anyone outside the craft so long
as they lived. It was thought that perhaps only those of select blood
lines had minds capable of holding these secrets without going insane;
it was thought--oh, many many things were thought of the guardians!
Generally aloof, wrapped in the cloak of esoteric knowledge, they lived
among us as superior beings, complex where we were simple, sober where
we were light-hearted, supremely important where any one of us could be
replaced by a score of others.

Over The Nameless the guardians had power, and kept them confined to
their stark and blighted-seeming country beyond the Fearful Forest. I
never knew a man so daring or so rash as to ask any sort of impertinent
question of a guardian, whether about his work or his cabalistic
secrets or his terrible charges. The less said or even thought of The
Nameless, the better.

So the guardians moved between the glens and the jagged cliffs, revered
by men and shunned by beasts of prey, accepting food and comforts and
at times a mate from our ranks; the sole protection of humanity from
their age-old enemies....

_The Nameless!_

       *       *       *       *       *

Suddenly I realized I was approaching the limits of the Fearful Forest.
I peered keenly at the great mutilated tracks in the mold. Yes, it was
still Halfspoor I followed, and here was Laq's mark too.

I think it was then that I began to feel fear, when I knew that I
should have to skirt the country of The Nameless. It never entered my
head that Halfspoor would go straight on across the blackened plain;
surely not even a bear would pass too near the forbidden lands. But he
was evidently going to have a distant look at them, and so perforce I
must have one likewise.

Soon the trees thinned a little, and daylight crept toward me from
between their boles. Then in a few moments I stood on the edge of the
woodland. I began to sing to myself in a tuneless mumble. There was
very little joy in me, and I felt I would be happier with some man-made
noise, even such noises as came from my unskilled throat.

One sweeping glance I gave the plain before me. There were the slimy
pools with their odious tufts of weeds and strings of water vines
emerging like sentient things of evil. There were the undulating bare
stretches of black dead soil from which nothing sprouted. And beyond,
strange cragged rocks and cairns upreared haphazardly in profusion for
many thousands of paces, until at last the raw red cliffs leaped up to
cry a halt to them and all this barren, frightful country ... beyond
the cliffs, what man knew what might be?

One glance, and then I flung myself into a pile of touchwood,
scattering the punk in blinding, billowing clouds and bruising my
shoulder on a hidden stump. As I had heard the thin twang of a
bowstring, I now heard the quick heavy crump of an arrow striking a
tree, just before my face was buried in the crumbling tinder. I rolled
over behind a log, eyes full of the dry powdery stuff and nostrils
twitching against the longing to sneeze. My own bow was in my hand
and an arrow nocked before I rubbed my vision clear; then I peered
cautiously over the log in the direction whence the shaft had come.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nothing moved, so presently I bounced to my feet and went over to the
right to inspect the arrow, which had buried itself two finger-lengths
in the bark. I broke it off and stared at the feathers and green-dyed
butt. It was one I had made myself.

Standing without movement, I listened hard, and at last heard someone's
careless foot crack a twig in the distance. Then I allowed myself the
luxury of an ear-shattering sneeze.

One of our own glen-folk had shot at me. There was no escaping that
fact. It might have been anyone save a hunter, for all of us made our
own weapons, giving the surplus to be divided among the less adroit men
of the other callings.

In the split second between the string's song and the thunk of the
arrow, it had flashed into my mind that one of The Nameless was
shooting at me. For of course no one knew exactly what they did, just
how they injured men, or even what they looked like; they might be
ogres with twelve arms and seven heads, carrying half-a-dozen bows....

But this was an arrow of _my making_. That meant that the shot had
been a warning to return to a safer place, an admonition that I was
wandering too far, sent dramatically by one of the patrolling guardians.

Yet why had he not merely stepped up and warned me? All the guardians
knew me well. They knew I would be tractable to any suggestion. Why had
he shot and fled?

So conditioned is our race to amity and all-embracing brotherly love,
so incredible is the thought of violence between men, that it took
quite five minutes of cogitation before the terrible idea occurred
to me: that it might have been Laq, a jealous and hate-filled Laq,
shooting not to warn, but to murder.

I remembered the legend of the bones of Sunset Fields, and a sickness
took me in the pit of the stomach for a while. Then I put the grotesque
thought from me, and went to look for Halfspoor's trail once more.

       *       *       *       *       *

It ran clear and straight out across the black plain; I rubbed my chin
and hesitated briefly. Then, nocking an arrow, I strode out and away
from the edge of the Fearful Forest. My skin began to crawl, crawl
with dread, but with scowling eyes I traced the prints before me, and
there was no possibility in my mind of turning back now. Remembrance of
the shaft in the tree was angering me more with every step. Warning
or murder weapon, its insolent caveat was the final stimulation I had
needed to force my frightened body onward.

If you are not a hunter, perhaps you will not understand the intense
and passionate ascendancy that a stalk may gain over a man's will. He
begins in a spirit of sport, it may be, thinking, "I shall pit my wits
against this stag--or bison, or cave cat--and see if I can out-think
him." Then after so long he begins to feel feverish about the temples,
his hands sweat, his breath comes shorter; and suddenly it is not an
idle hour's sport, but a whole life he is living in these moments, a
veritable microcosm of existence, and the quarry is not simply a great
dangerous animal, but all foemen, all desirable goals, everything he
wants for himself and in the same moment everything he has fought and
will fight forever. I cannot make it plainer. It is just this: the
longer the hunting, the more acute grows the urgency to come up with
and slay this fleeing creature, whether it be jackal-rat or eagle or
two-ton knifetooth bear. If the hunter be a real man, he will not cease
from pursuit while there is wind in his lungs and a modicum of strength
in his hands.

Even though the game lead him into such a place as the country of The
Nameless, from which, as we all have been told from infancy, there
is no escape, your true hunter cannot stand and let it go. I had
been making pictures in my head for half a day's spooring, of what I
should do to this great ursine brute when I caught him; I was entirely
incapable of returning empty-handed. I think that even without the
impetus of that furtive skulker with the arrow, I would have gone on.
As it was ... I quickened my pace.

The blackened plain was broader than it had seemed from the forest. I
trotted briskly over it, avoiding the stinking pools, and on all its
grim surface nothing moved except myself. The pugmarks of Halfspoor
went straight as an owl's death-strike toward the broken cairns and
ragged rocks. Biting my lips with determination, I followed them. I
was in a strange state of single-mindedness, like a man drunken on
fermented tree fern sap who knows only that he wants to do one thing
and that, no matter how ridiculous it may be, nothing will stop him
from doing it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Already I had gone a thousand paces farther than any man of my
race--save the guardians--had ever gone before. The earth beneath my
bare toes was gritty, almost like powdered stone, and I did not wonder
that nothing grew here except in the scummy pools of stagnant rainwater.

Now the first of the queer cairns was before me. Halfspoor had gone
around it. So did I.

A shadow moved in the far corner of my left eye. I gazed swiftly
toward it, but it was gone.

A shudder ran up the back of my legs and quivered across my shoulders
till my hands shook. Yet my stalking-madness would not let me be long
afraid.

Here was a plot of ground between two walls of unevenly-piled rocks.
Trails of jackal-rats threaded its smooth surface, and across
Halfspoor's prints ran those of a big lone dogwolf. I was bewildered.
Could _this_ be the country of The Nameless, over which even the eagles
feared to soar? Or did it lie, perhaps, beyond those bleak cliffs
yonder?

Here Halfspoor had caught himself a jackal-rat. Said I not that he was
a foul feeder? He had torn the scavenger in two and spent five or ten
minutes in wolfing down the tenderer portions.

Where was he heading, this temerarious bear? What curious siren call
was luring him (and quite possibly me) to destruction?

I paused by a wall, to pick out with the point of my knife a thorn that
had been working its way into my heel. This wall, now: it appeared to
have been built a-purpose. The base was straight and made of thick
square blocks, the upper rows knocked a little out of line but still
fairly even. Between the stones was a crumbly, grainy material, and in
places it still adhered to the rock in lumps and patches. I scratched
my head over it, forgetting Halfspoor. Suppose, now, a man wanted
to build a wall of such huge stones--provided he found a way to move
them in the first place, for they were enormously heavy--would he
not concoct some gummy or cohesive substance with which to hold them
together? And in the course of time, of many moons and years, would
this substance not possibly harden and then decay, leaving traces such
as I now pried away with my thumbnail?

But what would a man want with a wall like this?

       *       *       *       *       *

A light shone in my mind. Why, if he had such a wall erected across one
end of a glen, it might keep the carnivores from his tribe's trees, and
there would be no need for more than one or two night watchers!

If I lived to return to our valley, I would lay this idea before my
people. It was amazingly simple, and yet new. Surely no one had ever
thought of it before.

Well, I went on through the rocky ruins.

Halfspoor was heading for the cliffs. In this bad unfamiliar soil it
was hard to judge the age of his traces, but I thought he could not be
more than half an hour ahead of me now.

Again a shadow moved just beyond the range of my vision, and again when
I looked around it had gone.

I thought of Laq. I should have traced his footprints at the edge of
the wood and discovered the truth concerning that arrow.

Shadows....

I was not exactly happy. But I traveled on over Halfspoor's trail,
committed to the rash impulsive adventure beyond recall. At one point
I passed a lair, dug out beneath one of the shapeless cairns and lined
with torn fur, which stunk of dogwolf; the bones of many big hares
littered the ground before its mouth, but there were none of the fierce
occupants at home just then, and I passed on. There were more signs of
beasts hereabouts than one could find in all the valleys back beyond
Sunset Fields, and my amazement grew within me. This was not what the
guardians had told us concerning the country of The Nameless, they who
were doom and destruction to everything that drew breath.

Here was a place where Halfspoor had seated himself to rest, in a
corner of the ancient walls. Tiny tufts of grizzled fur were left
sticking to the rough surface, where the bear had rubbed his back
contentedly over the stones. I inhaled deeply of his scent. He was not
far ahead now!

       *       *       *       *       *

Indeed he was not; less than two hundred cautious paces had I gone
when his mighty frame rose before me, towering up beyond a rock so
abruptly that I thought he must have heard me and lain in wait. Then
I realized, even as my fingers flew in a panic to my quiver, that his
back was toward me and he was staring forward and up, making a guttural
pleading sort of noise in his chest. I could scarcely shoot him in the
back (it would only have enraged him anyway), so I slipped off to the
left and crept along behind a low broken wall until I judged I was
opposite him. Carefully I raised my head. There he was, all fourteen
feet of him, his monstrous head tipped back and his mouth open, so that
his twin fangs in profile seemed but a single terrible yellow tusk.
I might have lanced an arrow through his cranium then, but ... well,
Ahmusk the hunter is no assassin. When the day comes on which I dare
not fight fairly, even with a knifetooth bear, then I shall break my
bow and take to garland-weaving.

I stared up to see what he was moaning at. Before him at a little
distance rose a thing like a flat-faced precipice, which I had been
watching and wondering about for some minutes. It appeared to have been
_constructed_, like the low walls I had examined; but its stones were
even larger than theirs, and its overall surface much smoother. At
regular intervals, and in series of evenly spaced lines, across this
uncanny cliff, there ran large square openings, like many blind eyes
in an ogre. There were five of these horizontal lines of holes, rising
up until the top of the cliff all shattered and craggy put an end to
them. I would say this strange erection was more than seventy feet high.

Framed in one of the holes on the second level sat another knifetooth
bear, deep brown where Halfspoor was grizzled, smaller than the old
scoundrel by a third of his bulk, and--my word on it!--an expression of
coyness about her shaggy face that nearly made me burst out laughing.
This was the lodestone which had dragged him inexorably over the brooks
and through the Fearful Forest, even into the land of The Nameless. A
female! A bear-wench!

She glared at him sidelong, her black nose pointed down and her
comparatively short two-foot fangs digging into her shoulder; while
Halfspoor, giddy and fatuous with love, made his drooling noises of
courtship.

       *       *       *       *       *

I sat down with a bump--he was oblivious to me and to everything but
his light-o'-love--and chuckled helplessly. Then I frowned. What
should I do? Leap up and dance to attract his attention? Or leave
him to his wooing and trust to run across his trail another day? You
will understand that my stalking-fever, which even the country of
The Nameless had not been able to dispel, was misted away by this
development as though it had never been. Poor old Halfspoor! It would
be a scurvy trick to interrupt him now with death.

And even as I thought these comradely thoughts, the whine of an arrow
came from nowhere and on its heels the angry squall of the giant bear.
I twisted round and looked over the wall. There was a shaft, fleshed in
his furry thigh; and Halfspoor was gazing at me with no friendliness
whatever.

It was no time for idle wondering as to the source of that arrow.
Indeed, I think I knew instinctively who had sent it over my head into
the courting bruin. But as I leaped the scattered rocks and dodged the
higher walls of that ruinous place, I was seeking only an advantageous
battleground, not the stealthy prowler with the bow. At my back I
could hear the wrathful snorting of the knifetooth bear, the swift
thud-thud of his enormous paws, and the rattle of stones dislodged by
his whirlwind passage.

My bow was in my hand, a lean arrow nocked on the cord. Hastily as I
ran I gripped two others between the fingers of my left hand. Skirting
a heap of gray lichen-grown rubble, I whirled on my toes and sent the
first missile back at him. When I could risk a glance again, he had
fallen a little behind, being some forty long paces in the rear, and
was swatting impatiently at the broken shaft protruding from his thigh.
I think my own shot had missed him, and considering my haste, I was not
surprised.

I halted and taking a decent aim I loosed one at his head. At the
same moment he roared loudly, opening his immense mouth to its full
extent. Luck not being with me, the arrow glanced off one of his
overgrown fangs with a sharp click, which appeared to startle Halfspoor
considerably, because he stopped dead and blinked down his muzzle in a
quaint way. I shot the third of my arrows and tore a long red furrow up
one gray-sprinkled cheek. Then, as he was nearly atop me in four sudden
raging bounds, I fled like a hare amongst the ruins. His coughing and
bellowing echoed like implacable thunder in my ears.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a deep and narrow gut of a trench that ran between two high
stone walls. In jumping it I had an idea; doubled back, narrowly missed
being decapitated by a swipe of one savage paw, and dived over the
rocks into this curious thoroughfare. Scuttling like a jackal-rat, I
went on toes and fingers off to the right, with Halfspoor's vociferance
threatening to crack my eardrums. Two or three times he reached down
for a blow at my back, and I actually felt the wind of his pad's thrust
on my nape. Then he darted ahead, if such a titanic monster may be said
to dart, and leaning over one wall he waited for me. Clever brute!
He would scoop me out of my ditch like a fish from a runlet, would
he? I vaulted the wall opposite to his side and after one hasty shot
flew into a crazy labyrinth of ancient ramparts and disintegrating
inclosures. An insane bawling told me I had probably hit him again. I
had ten arrows left. My confidence was growing. Only let me find a tall
cairn to scale, and I would make Halfspoor into a positive porcupine
with those ten missiles.

A sun-blind owl sat in a filthy nest among fallen blocks of stone. As I
dashed past, it blundered out and flew into my face, beating its heavy
wings and jabbing furiously at my eyes with its little hooked bill. I
fended it off with the bow, gripped my bone-headed hatchet and with a
long-armed glancing swing hit it under one of the big dazzled eyes. It
fell away, screeching, and I ran on. Halfspoor's grunt was close behind.

Then, some distance off, I caught the sound of howling, and knew that
a pack of fierce dogwolves were running on a scent. I hoped they would
not come here to complicate matters.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a place where broken walls flanked a row of stones which
rose gradually upward, somewhat like a ladder placed halfway between
horizontal and vertical; that is, a man could step on one stone, then
up on the next, then the next, and so on, until he found himself quite
high in the air. The row ended on a flat floor open to the winds of
heaven, some twenty-odd feet from the ground; and here and there
around this flat place irregular rocky projections rose. I had seen
enough of this country by now to know that the projections must once
have been another wall, rising to enclose this flat floor. Why someone,
or something, had gone to so much trouble to make these ancient walls,
I could not imagine. At first I had thought it must have been a truly
gigantic being, to lift the huge stones. Now I had seen so many
inclosures roofed over (as we roof over our platforms with thick fronds
during the brief weeks of the winter) at a height of no more than nine
or ten feet, that I could not believe a giant had made them. Why should
he make a place in which he would have to lie down, never standing? But
on the other hand, that may have been the case. It was hardly the time
for philosophical speculations. I trotted up the stone ramp briskly and
cast my eyes about for a good shooting-nook.

Halfspoor was hot after me. He dropped to all fours and came up the
graduated stones as though he had been using such conveniences all his
life--and it was not truly so different from climbing a rocky hill,
except that this was smoother going. I dashed for a heap of rubble at
one corner. Leaping this, I crouched down as Halfspoor hit the top at
a run. I shot at him and my ill luck was still with me, for again my
shaft glanced off one of his frightful tusks. Surely an evil fog lay
over my eyes that day! He charged in my direction and I had time for
but one more swift arrow, which I had the good sense not to aim at
his head. It buried half its length rather low in his shoulder and he
squalled resentfully. Then I slipped over the edge and dropped to the
ground.

       *       *       *       *       *

I had calculated the drop well. It was too much for his bulk. He loomed
above me, raging. I put an arrow in his cheek, and he bit down hard
and spat out the head and part of the shaft. I drew a good bead on his
eye but he turned much more quickly than I had anticipated and the
missile whined away in the sky. He headed back for the climbing stones.
I looked about me. There was a broken inclosure nearby in one wall of
which was an entrance like a cave mouth, perhaps seven feet high by two
broad: it seemed as good a place as any to dodge into, and I did. There
I awaited his coming, controlling my breathing as best I could in order
that my next shots would not be so shamefully wasted.

Then I heard the dogwolf pack much closer. They yapped and yowled, and
mingled with their excited noise was the petulant grunt of Halfspoor.
Still I waited, but he did not come. Then I knew by the sounds that the
dogwolves had surrounded him. Here was an odd happening! Certainly no
dogwolf would attack a knifetooth bear, even though he ran with five
score other canines. Only a very silly human hunter would pit himself
against old Halfspoor.

But, by my love for Lora, they were shepherding him across the ruins!
I caught a glimpse of the old devil backing reluctantly up a mound,
and then as I gaped he turned and shambled off down a black ravine,
complaining and waving his forepaws angrily. In a great circle they
followed him, nipping at his heels, leaping out of range, and keeping
up an incessant clamor that sounded like boys teasing a captured cave
cat kitten.

I counted the arrows in my quiver. There were six now. Ill luck rode
my shoulders that day. Halfspoor should be bleeding to death with
eight shafts in his chest and head; instead he had four or five
inconsiderable wounds, one of which I had not even given him.

I spat on the ground, wishing I had a drink of water. Ahmusk, mighty
stalker of knifetooth bears! I laughed without mirth. Ahmusk, desperate
invader of the land of The Nameless. There, now, was a title for a
brave man; but I had come here in the grip of hunting-fever, and so
little credit attached to me for the deed. I was in a mood to revile
myself aloud. I smote my bare thigh and swore heartily. What should I
do now about Halfspoor? There was no profit in advertising my presence
to the dogwolf pack. They had been known to pull down men if they were
hungry.

       *       *       *       *       *

I put my hands to my ears and rubbed them roughly, for of a sudden
they were tingling and prickling. It was as though I had heard a high
unpleasant sound; but except for the distant uproar of Halfspoor and
his annoyers, there was nothing. The country was bewitched, that was
it. There was a pause, and then my eardrums thrilled briefly again to
something I could not locate or analyze.

I glanced behind me at the inclosure. Roofless, I had the feeling that
it must once have been roofed; there were low piles of rock trash all
about, as there would have been had the roof--fallen now--been somehow
impossibly made of stone. What prodigies of strength and skill had
wrought these incredible walls? I shook my head, and turned back to the
entrance.

There was something approaching slowly over the ruined structures to my
right. I looked at it with widening eyes. It was about a hundred paces
off. For one sickening moment I believed it to be some horrid kind
of ogre, made of muck or rotted flesh or some such grisly matter; it
seemed slimy and _dead_....

Then the sun struck it, and I decided that it was simply covered with
long trailing dark hair, which glistened wetly in the rays of the dying
sun.

It came on, and my knees smote together while my tongue stuck to the
roof of my sudden-dried mouth.

In form it was like a man. Indeed, had a man been smeared with black
mud, and then been given a coat of heavy hair, oily or permanently damp
hair, he might well have resembled this creature. I judged it to be
about six feet or a little over, my own height; and so later it proved
to be. It moved oddly, with a sort of halting gait, weaving its arms
to keep its balance on the jagged rocks. I could see two deep blackish
pits in its head where its eyes would be, and matted straggly hair fell
lifelessly from its crown. It was naked, like an animal.

I thought of my mother's old songs of the ogre-breed, which can take
all manner of shapes, but often emulate mankind, building their frames
magically from dead beasts or from the masses of decomposing vegetable
matter in the forests. Maybe my first idea had been right, and this was
an ogre of mire and pelts, all wickedness.

At any rate, it was coming at me, if rather slowly; and so I put an
arrow to the string, being minded to die bravely as becomes a hunter of
the glen-folk.

Seeing me raise the bow, it waved at me in protest, and with so human
a gesture that I could not shoot it, but only held my weapon ready. It
then raised one hand to its face, with something bright in its fingers
(it had fingers, I could see, like a man's), and my ears tingled again
to the unheard sound or vibration which had bothered me previously.

       *       *       *       *       *

From the ruins behind it rose the noise of dogwolves barking. It
nodded, like a man who would say to himself, That is good. Then it came
on with its slow, almost apologetic pace. I lowered my bow. Somehow I
felt that it meant me no injury.

When it was no more than half-a-dozen feet off, it halted; and we
stared at each other curiously.

It was a hairy brute, to be sure, but evidently no ogre. Its thatch
glistened darkly, and seemed of the consistency of a cave cat's mane,
but without curls; lank, long, and thick. In the places where this
mantle did not grow, as on the cheeks and forehead and on the rounded
portions of the limbs, there was a short dusky shag, a nap like that
on a knifetooth bear's muzzle. The effect was startling, but on close
inspection not really ugly, and wholly without the impression of terror
which my first sight of it had brought. It appeared to be watching me
steadily, though its eyes were entirely hidden in their sunken shadowed
wells. Finally it put up its right hand to the level of its waist and
held it there. I could not see the significance of the gesture. After
a moment it thrust the open hand out to me in several short jabs. The
motion was entirely without menace. I could make nothing of it.

It clasped its hands together and shook them. Then it stuck the right
one toward me again. I realized that it wished to touch my own hand!

I shifted my bow to my left hand--so sure had I grown in these few
brief seconds that it meant no harm--and touched its hairy fingertips.
Instantly my hand was enfolded in a firm hearty grip, and moved rapidly
up and down. I cannot explain how or why the emotion swept over me,
but immediately I felt a warm friendship for this shaggy being, such a
feeling as I had never held before for anything save my fellow men and
women of the valleys.

And there was something else. The gesture felt ... felt natural, and
proper, and almost _familiar_, as though I had done it many times
before!

Mystified, I drew back my hand as he released it; and once more we
stood staring at each other without sound.

       *       *       *       *       *

A movement at last caught my eye, and staring over his shoulder I saw
two great dogwolves breast a wall and come loping toward us. With a
warning cry I threw up my bow. In the time it took me to change hands
on it, he had peered back; then he gave a cry, remarkably manlike in
tone, and waved urgently at my face. Scowling, I dodged back to get
a shot at the foremost brute. At once the hairy thing knelt, as if
pleading, and the pair of dogwolves, coming up, fawned on him with
lolling scarlet tongues.

My jaw dropped and I gasped, dumbfounded.

The fierce beasts were his friends!

I slung my bow over my shoulder, but took the precaution of grasping my
bone hatchet. The dogwolves stared at me, their hot eyes as puzzled as
no doubt my own were; but they made no move toward me.

The hairy being stood up and came forward to touch me lightly on the
chest. Then he shook my right hand up and down again. The dogwolves
crept on their bellies to our shadows, and one of them, a giant of a
fellow, touched my foot with his wet nose, whining a little.

If there has ever been a more astonished person than I was at that
second, he must have fainted away with his wonder. I know I grew quite
giddy. Now, I said to myself, if Halfspoor were to amble up to me
and ask for the loan of my knife, I think he would get it without a
question or a raised eyebrow!

The big carnivores lay panting beside us, and the dark rough-coated
manlike creature rubbed his chin and stared at me from those deepset
eyes; which I could make out now, as they were glittering in a stray
beam of sunlight that fell across his strange face.

He said something to me. It was not an animal's noise, but a reasonable
imitation of human speech, except that none of the words were familiar.

At once I remembered the young hunter who had come to our glen several
years before, from a country far to the north. His language, while
much the same as ours, had words in it which we had never heard; and
the elders of the tribe said that probably other folk, living in other
isolated places, must have developed words of their own too.

       *       *       *       *       *

This being, of course, seemed to me at first no more a man than were
the dogwolves at his feet. He had the same general form, yes, and
perhaps even the exact conformation of features under that mat of hair;
but what human by any stretch of the imagination could ever grow such a
pelt?

Nonetheless, his voice was pleasing enough to the ear, and his speech
seemed separated into distinct words, though as I have said, none of
them were familiar to me.

I said, "Friend what-is-it, you undoubtedly know what you're talking
about, but I do not. I would give a new set of hunting arrows to be
able to understand you."

He uttered more words, pointing off to the west where the tall raw
cliffs were even now shutting off the lower half of the sun.

"Yes," I said, "evening comes on, and you're afraid I'll wander over
into the country of The Nameless. Is that it? Never you fear, my
friend, I'll not go a step farther in that direction."

But he took my hand, hesitantly and as though afraid that I might be
offended; and he tried to lead me westward.

I hung back, and the dogwolves growled a little, but desisted when he
spoke to them. Then he signed to me, as plainly as one could imagine,
that there was food where he was taking me; and so because of my
grumbling belly I suffered him to lead me off among the ruins of this
fabulous place.

As we walked I thought of Lora, and her distress in the morning when
she would find me still away; but not for anything would I tread the
paths of the Fearful Forest at night. I must find a sleeping place
nearby.

We passed the flat-faced precipice with the five lines of square
openings, where Halfspoor's brown lady had been sitting. I pointed up
and said, "Knifetooth bear!" He cocked his head at me. I hunched my
shoulders, put two fingers athwart my lips for fangs, roared like a
bear and said, "Knifetooth!" again.

The hairy one stopped, opened his mouth--he had teeth as even and
white as my own--and out of his throat came the exact duplicate of old
Halfspoor's battle cry. The dogwolves leaped and barked excitedly. I
nodded agreement and said, "Bear!"

He said something guttural that sounded like _oorsa_. I made him repeat
it several times. It occurred to me that _ursus_ is another of our
names for old knifetooth; and my wonder grew apace.

Pointing to myself, I then exclaimed, "Ahmusk!"

He said my name with no difficulty, and then seemed rather confused;
for he tapped his own black chest and said, "Ahmusk?"

I tried again. I touched the bigger of the two canines and said,
"Dogwolf."

He mastered that more or less, and in return gave me his name for the
brute, which was _poort_ or _spoort_, I could not tell which. His
sibilants were tongued so lightly that they were difficult to hear.

       *       *       *       *       *

I indicated myself and said, "Man." I prodded him and repeated it. Then
I realized consciously for the first time that I was now regarding him
as a species of human. He had taken me for kin before, as his former
use of my name as a generic term plainly proved.

"Ahmusk," said I once more, beating my bosom.

"Ahmusk," said he, pointing; and then, laying a shining-haired paw on
his own breast, "Dy-lee!"

"Dy-lee," I said, charming him no end, for he capered grotesquely and
nodded his head till the lank thatch flew.

Well, now we were acquainted. My pleasure at finding this strange
brute-man was out of all proportion to its apparent importance.
I suppose it was reaction to my hours-long suspicion that I had
played the complete fool in coming into this country, in following
the terrible Halfspoor, in ignoring the age-old forbiddance against
crossing into the land of The Nameless.... Now all seemed to have come
out well. Halfspoor, who had been proving more than a match for me,
had been harried off, evidently on orders from this Dy-lee creature,
by a pack of dogwolves. The Nameless were nowhere in evidence. Food
and possibly a tree for the night were in the offing. And I had made a
wonderful discovery, a brain-shaking find; for if I was right, I had
chanced upon a new branch of the family of men.

Through the ruins we went, the dogwolves at our heels; and we were
as delighted with one another as two boys who have been given their
father's old bone hatchet to play with.

       *       *       *       *       *

The silver dusk came up from the earth, spawned from the shadows of
the many ruinous walls and ramparts; and far ahead I saw a scarlet eye
wink out at us from the darkening cliff. I clutched Dy-lee's shaggy arm
involuntarily, and hissed at him, as though he understood the words,
"The Nameless!"

He understood, at any rate, that I was frightened; for he patted me
awkwardly on the back two or three times, and said something in his
language meant, by the tone, to be reassuring.

A hunter could not hang back where a brute-man like this went on. He
obviously knew what the scarlet eye was, and seemed utterly without
fear. And so after a time we had come near enough to it for me to see
that it was no ghastly orb of a Nameless ogre, but the mouth of a cave,
fairly high up the raw cliff, shining with the reflection of a fire
deep within it.

Evidently Dy-lee meant to go into the cave, for soon we had struck a
well-worn path and were traveling upward. I imagined that there were
friends of his there, with whom he would eat before seeking his tree
for the night. Overcoming my dislike of caves with a wrenching effort,
I followed him up the path and stood on the threshold of the grotto,
having a last look about me. From this vantage point I could see the
glimmering of fires from several other great holes which had been
hidden from the plain.

Then I went into the cave of Dy-lee the hairy man.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fire, leaping merrily within a ring of stones, heated the long
tunnel-like cavern for many paces on all sides; and about it, some
cooking meat, some engaged in low-voiced conversation, and some making
or repairing noose-traps, snares for rabbits and birds such as our
children often play with, were a score or so of the long-maned people.
My last doubt as to their humanity vanished at sight of the flames, for
no animal can control fire. Except for their pelts, these folks might
have been my own.

Some of them sprang to their feet as we entered, waving their arms and
shouting. Dy-lee quieted them with a crisp word, and putting his hand
on my shoulder he made a speech at which they all came crowding around,
each one wanting to shake my hand up and down. It was all wonderfully
friendly and heart-warming. Instinctively I loved these people, and
pitied them a little, too, for that they must live so close to the
terrible country of The Nameless.

At thought of those malignant beings, I remembered Laq the guardian,
whose arrow (I felt sure) had goaded the bear Halfspoor into attacking
me; but at once I put the bitter thought from me, and shaking the hand
of one dark fellow while grinning amiably into the almost featureless
face of another, I moved to the fire and was given a haunch of hare,
all smoking and hot from the spits above the flames. After I had
wolfed this, while the whole company stared at me and chattered among
themselves. Dy-lee handed me some meat off the brisket of a doe. I
wondered how they managed to catch deer, for the only traps in evidence
were the small rabbit-snares, while none of them carried lances or bows
or even metal knives, but had some crude flint daggers with which they
made shift to cut up their meat. Then my eye fell on several of the
tame _poorts_, or dogwolves, lounging insolently about among the hairy
folk; and I recalled their pack chivvying Halfspoor over the ruins.
There was the answer! Incredible though it was, these men must have
trained their four-footed companions to pull down deer--even stag and
bison for all I knew--for the masters' larder.

       *       *       *       *       *

I sat down on the floor by the ring of firestones, weary with tracking
and fighting and surprises. At once all of them came close to me and
seated themselves too, clamoring good-humoredly for their dinner. They
still peered curiously at me, but with such a friendly air that no
offense could be taken. As we ate, Dy-lee pointed to various members
of the group, or family, as it possibly was, and told me their names,
which I did my best to master. The oldest of them, a seven-foot giant
of a man with very long grizzled-silver hair falling in cascades all
over his body, was called Dy-vee, or Dy-veece, I could not be sure
which. He seemed to be the chief, or the grandfather, for when a bevy
of young females began to giggle loudly together, he spoke to them
with authority and they were hushed.

The woman whom I took to be Dy-lee's mate was a slim, high-breasted
she, whose hair was sleeker and finer than his, and on whose face the
shag was lighter and not of so matted a nature. It was on this shy
creature that I first perceived the color of the cave folk's skin; when
I was told her name (which was Zheena), she put back the long hair of
her forehead with a very feminine gesture, and I saw that just around
her eyes, less deepsunk than the males', there was no fur at all. The
skin was white, like a winter's baby before it is tanned by the sun,
and seemed smooth and firm. I resolved, when I should know Dy-lee
better, to have a try at burrowing in the nap of his face to see if he
too were white beneath it.

So we got through the meal somehow, between introductions and polite
gestures and much high laughter at our mispronunciations and general
inability to understand each other. When I had eaten all I could hold,
I leaned back against a wall of this cheerful cavern, with my hands
pillowing my head, and because my stomach was full and my heart light,
I began to sing.

The effect was that of a lightning bolt striking among them. They stood
petrified for long seconds, and then came swarming from everywhere
to hear me; and I, whose voice is admittedly like that of a wounded
bison bellowing to its herd, stopped my song with a grunt and stared
openmouthed at the shaggy people. Dy-lee made quick eager motions to
me, opening his mouth time after time, and presently it was borne in
upon me that they wanted me to sing again. They wanted Bear-throat to
sing!

       *       *       *       *       *

So I sang. I caroled a love ditty, which made all the females roll
their eyes and sigh; and I chanted a song of the hunt, which set all
the bare hairy toes to beating on the rock floor. I sang all the songs
I could recollect of my mother's repertory, the rollicking ones and the
sad ones, the lullaby tunes and the haunting melodies that told our
legends of the far olden times. For the space of at least two hours
I sang to them, and when at last I stopped, for lack of breath and
rawness of throat, and because I could not remember another song to
save me, you would have thought the cave was falling in, such a noise
they made. I saw then that many, many more had pressed into the place,
until it was packed with scores of the hairy folk, and there was no
vacant space anywhere in the grotto except for the little cleared place
on which I sat. Even their great dogwolves were lying about watching me
with quizzically cocked heads, and looking as though they enjoyed it.

They liked _my_ singing! The all-but-tuneless caterwauling of
Bear-throat the hunter enchanted them to immobility! I could scarcely
believe it, even though they had listened to me for so long.

I pointed at Dy-lee and by gestures, asked him to sing. He shook his
head and shrugged, an especially human movement; as plain as if he had
said it in words, I knew that neither he nor any of the others had ever
known what it was to lift the voice in song. They were a people wholly
without music. No wonder my bawling had enthralled them!

Gradually, the cavern cleared; although they obviously wanted to stay
and listen to me, and gaze wide-eyed on my bronze hairless skin, old
grizzled Dy-veece shepherded them out into the night with gruff barks
of command. When only the family, or whatever this group might be, was
left, he came to me and after patting me a few times and shaking my
hand up and down, handed me a sleeping fur. It was cave cat, and very
like my own blankets at home. I looked to be led out to a tree then,
but saw that the folk were one by one lying down near the fire, wrapped
in their furs and evidently intent on sleeping in the cave. I think
this astonished me as much as anything I had seen in all that strange
day, for who ever heard of sleeping anywhere but on a tree platform?
Nevertheless, I could scarcely wound the feelings of my hosts by going
out alone and thus refusing their hospitality; so with a weak smile at
Dy-lee and his mate, who were watching me anxiously, I spread the great
yellow pelt on the bare rock, laid myself down on it, flipped the edges
over me, and closed my eyes with the certainty that I would not get a
blink of sleep all that night.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next thing I knew was that I was very warm and drowsy, and that
something was pressing cozily against me from both right and left. I
opened my eyes, yawned, and found that I was flanked by a pair of the
tame dogwolves, who were snoring gently into my ears. The fire was
crackling under half-a-dozen spits loaded with meat, a number of the
dark-haired people were moving about quietly, and the sun was beating
straight in the door of the cavern with a cheerful orange light.

Dy-lee, seeing that I was awake, brought me water in half the shell
of some great nut which I did not recognize; and Zheena, his mate,
presented me with a choice of fruits set on a wooden slab that had been
rounded and cleverly decorated with bright dyes.

After rinsing my mouth and eating an apple, I rose and stepped over a
dogwolf to go to the opening and look out on a beautiful autumn day,
crisp and clear as the one before had been. Then, after a few deep
satisfying breaths, I returned and made a hearty breakfast of meat in
company with all the cave folk.

When we had finished, Dy-lee led me down the path to the place of
ruins. By the vivid sunlight I could see that the walls at the base of
the cliff were somewhat less shattered than the first ones I had come
upon; and also that they were definitely no accidents of nature, but
constructed. I asked by gesture if his race had built these walls, and
he signed to me, No.

Shortly we came to an enclosure that still bore its roof. I went and
peered into this strange square place, and Dy-lee kindly handed me a
long torch of bound reeds soaked in black oily matter and lighted, the
purpose of his carrying which on this bright morning I had not hitherto
understood. Now I realized that he meant me to see everything there
was to be seen, whether open or hidden from the light; and I smiled my
thanks as I took the brand. Dy-lee and his two dogwolves followed me
into the place.

The roof was of stone, or perhaps of _a_ stone, for I could detect no
crack or joined place in all its surface. It was shored up by lesser
stones, long and thick and ornamented with carvings that resembled
the tendrils of the burrowflower. These must have been scratched into
the rock with a metal tool, I think; though it certainly would have
taken the whole lifetime of a man to accomplish all the carving I saw
there. I had never seen or heard of anyone carving deliberate designs
in anything before. The effect was lovely, albeit startling. Our
glen-folk decorated many things with dyes made of vegetables and roots
and minerals; but none had ever thought to adorn wood or stone with
carvings. And here again I was astonished, for after the first moment
or two, it seemed a natural and beautiful thing to do. It was like the
shaking of the hands, something that was surprising only at the first
acquaintance.

       *       *       *       *       *

While I stared about me, Dy-lee passed into a far corner and began to
clear away a great heap of trash, broken wood, old discarded sleeping
furs, and other useless articles, which had been piled in a haphazard
fashion there. I followed him across the floor and saw that he had
cleared a space in the center of which was a square slab of stone set
into the floor, with a huge ring embedded in one side of it. This ring
he now grasped, and began to tug and haul at it, grunting with the
strain. The block of stone moved upward, fell, moved and fell again,
and it seemed it would take him an age to lift it free. So I put my
hand on the ring beside his. He relinquished it to me, I think out of
curiosity to see how powerful I was; and it was then I discovered that
I was much the stronger, for the slab came up out of its hole smoothly
and easily to my tug. Dy-lee straightened and said something in an
awe-struck voice.

"That is the result of a hunter's life, friend Dy-lee," I said,
grinning. "If you stalked with a bow and a hatchet, rather than a pack
of dogwolves, you would be as strong as I."

Pointing down into the black well exposed by the raising of the stone,
he indicated the torch in my hand. I thrust it down into the mouth of
the well. There was a kind of sputtering sound from the brand, which
I could not attribute to anything in particular, except perhaps that
the fire was afraid to go down into that jetty darkness. Peering past
it, I saw a line of the graduated stones that abounded in these ruined
places, going down like a curious tilted rock ladder into the depths of
the earth. Dy-lee made urgent motions to me, that I should go down. I
shook my head. "Not for an extra year of life, friend," I said.

He took the torch from me and before I could stop him he had dropped
into the pit. The two dogwolves brushed by me and followed him down.

Well, it ill became a hunter of the glen-folk to sit here gnawing his
knuckles when even the brute beasts showed no fear of this terrible
hole; so with many misgivings I took my first hesitant steps down the
underground passage.

It was almost pleasant in the tunnel. I had expected chill and
dampness, but the walls were dry and quite warm to the touch, rather
like the rocks on the sides of Ruddy Mountain, which is the cone-shaped
hill that gives off sparks and smoke, far to the north of our land.
As we progressed downward, the flambeau lighting our way, I seemed to
notice even more heat; there may be a great fire somewhere beneath the
earth of the ruined country--who can tell?

       *       *       *       *       *

Shortly we came to a level stretch of tunnel, and some few score paces
thereafter, to a widening portion which shortly became about as broad
as the inclosure with the stone roof. Here it was like an ordinary
cave, except that the floor and walls and ceiling were flat, with
sharp angles at the jointures. The thought was inescapable: the giants
or whoever had made all the walls and inclosures above had hollowed
out the earth and made this place likewise. I examined the wall in
one place (it was all alike, as much as I saw of it that day). Small
smooth stones of agreeably differing colors were set in rows to form
the surface, and their substance was such as I had never found before,
being sleek and wonderfully glossy, as lustrous as the hair of my Lora
in the morning sunlight.

Dy-lee now seemed excited, and urged me to follow him swiftly through
the shining grotto. The dogwolves' claws clicked along the level
floor, and they constantly sniffed the air, which was musty and made
our breathing rather labored. The big torch crackled and blazed
brightly.

At last we turned a corner--as sharply angled as those at the base of
the walls--and after one look I gave a cry of fear, of brain-breaking
wonder.

How can I explain what I first thought I saw? It was ... it was as if
in this gallery there were many many square holes in the walls, and
each of these holes gave on a vista of vivid color and much apparent
movement; as though by some inconceivable magic there were different
worlds beyond each hole!

I covered my eyes with an arm and moaned with terror. My knees smote
together, my teeth chattered. And when Dy-lee laid a reassuring hand on
my shoulder, I leaped as though Halfspoor himself had snorted in my ear.

With murmurs meant to restore my confidence, he led me to one wall and
waited patiently until I found the courage to uncover my eyes. Then he
pointed to the first of the large square openings. Seeing that nothing
malignant had sprung out of it yet, and that the dogwolves had casually
lain down in the light dust of the floor, I gripped my nerves with the
teeth of my mind and peered closely.

       *       *       *       *       *

Again I am at a loss for words to tell of this marvel. It was not a
hole or opening, it was but an enclosed place on the wall, overlaid
with a sheet of something so shiny and transparent that it must have
been water frozen there forever by unthinkable sorcery. Beneath this
motionless water, the figure of a woman looked out at us with calm
unwinking gaze. She was dressed in fantastic furs, blue and emerald and
gold, wrought in patterns that surely no one had ever seen before; her
face, crowned by the gaudy feathers of a bird, was like those of my own
people, being without hair and gentle-looking. After a long time of
staring, I reached out to touch this wonder, and the still water over
it felt cool and slick to my fingertips. The woman made no move as my
hand passed before her. I was thunderstruck.

Dy-lee led me to the next enclosed place, and there was a man, clad
as fabulously as the woman, with a stern look of resolution on his
features. He seemed a curious hybrid, for while most of his face was as
smooth as mine, on his chin was a fringe of dark hair such as covered
Dy-lee's folk. Him I did not try to touch, for fear he should burst out
of the frozen water at me.

With the third of these strange things I began to notice something
else: namely, that the people--there were two behind this water--seemed
very flat and completely without true substance. It is difficult to
explain. It was as though a man could be pressed flat as a leaf, and
still hold his form, his color, even his life (though this was in
abeyance, _suspended_ as it were, yet waiting to break into movement at
any second).

       *       *       *       *       *

So we went down the long gallery, and I saw more multitudes of wonders
than ever I can tell. There were many sorts of folk in even more
awesome furs and pelts than the first; men clad entirely in what
appeared to be metal, and women in garments that surely never came
from the cave cat or doe or anything that walks our world today. There
were scenes I could not comprehend, enclosed flat places on the wall
which I could not make myself believe were flat places at all, but
rather must be the holes on vistas I had first thought them. These
showed tiny trees and brooks, figures of people smaller than my thumb,
even portions of the sky with infinitesimal clouds hanging motionless
therein. And it was after I had looked on two or three of these that
the truth began to come to me, like a fiery jewel of knowledge shining
murkily up through the black waters of my ignorance. For these were
not real people at all, nor real vistas, nor was there anything real
or magical about them at all; they were flat places on the walls,
whereon some clever man had laid multihued _dyes_, so that when all
were applied this representation of reality sprang to its mysterious,
incredible, unmoving life!

I longed to ask Dy-lee if this was the true nature of the things, but
could not think how to do it by signs. I therefore simply pointed at
one of them and raised my brows questioningly.

"_Peesha!_" said he. "_Peesha!_"

It was, I gathered, a peesha. Whatever that might be.

He put a finger on a certain part of this peesha, and said, "Tree!"

I reeled. Literally I reeled, staggering back and dropping my jaw like
a fool. "Tree?" I gasped. "Yes, yes, a tree!"

He made polite motions, asking me my word for it.

"Tree!" I shouted. I pointed to the beasts at our feet. "Dogwolves,"
I said, with one hand on my breast; then, aiming a finger at him and
still indicating the two animals, "poort," I said. He understood that,
for he nodded. I pointed to the wall. "Peesha," I cried, nodding to
him, and then, "flat place with many dyes," I said in my own tongue.
Finally, I waved at him and then at myself, and said, "Tree, tree.
Tree, _tree_!"

       *       *       *       *       *

He grasped it then. He was as amazed as I had been. We had at least one
word in common. It suggested astonishing possibilities to me. Eagerly I
touched the sky in the representation before us, the clouds, the earth,
a small hillock; naming them and getting his names in return. Not
until we came to a brook did our languages coincide again. Then I said,
"Stream," and he said, as clearly as any man could, "River." "Yes,
yes!" I shouted. "River, river!"

Babbling with excitement, he grasped my wrist and dragged me past
several of the dye-images to a large one that was without the
protecting rigid water, and which showed many men and women walking
about between stone inclosures such as littered the ground above us.
These inclosures, however, were not broken, but seemed whole and
strangely beautiful, being decorated lavishly with carving and dyes.
Some of them went up for hundreds of feet, as I could see by comparing
them with the size of the people. Before this peesha he halted and
proceeded to point out many things, naming them eagerly; but here we
could not find anything for which we had a mutual name. Indeed, it was
not remarkable, for most of the objects I had never seen until the day
before, and then only in a ruined state.

And so we passed down the cavern until we came to the end, and crossed
its narrow width to go back along the other side, looking at Dy-lee's
uncanny "peeshas;" and at last we had seen them all, and I was too
shattered for speech. Nothing like it had ever been thought of, had
ever been dreamt of, had ever been seen by anyone in all my world,
before today. That one could do this with dyes! Some of them had had
no water--he called it _glaa_--over them, and these I had touched
cautiously, finding their surfaces raised slightly here and there;
and had come to the conclusion that the dyes had been mixed cleverly
with harder substances, so that when they were put on the wall, they
stiffened there and would not blur nor run together.

And nearly as wonderful as these things was the fact that there were
points of contact in our languages, words which were the same in both
tongues. "Hand" was _and_ to him, or it may have been _hand_ also, as
his aspirates were breathed as lightly as his sibilants were tongued.
_Tree_, _river_, and _owl_ were the same. I grew quite wrought-up with
the fascination of the game, and could scarcely wait to tell Lora all
about it.

We went up the slanted stones to the surface, and after he had
carefully hidden the entrance slab with the rubble again (I could not
guess from what or whom), he led me across the ruins to another whole
roofed inclosure. This one we entered by a hole far up in one wall,
raising two logs for a kind of bridge from the ground. Into this place
the dogwolves did not follow, but lay down outside to await us.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dy-lee's torch was burning low. When we had dropped into the
inclosure, he chose two more from a pile of them stacked neatly in
a corner, and lit one from the first. It flared up redly, and again
we raised a ringed slab and descended into another warm dry place of
peeshas. By then, I may say, I had identified this with our own word
"picture," which we use to describe several things, such as the images
our minds form occasionally which seem to us very real, and also a
distant view of a beautiful countryside, as perhaps from a hill; I felt
certain that _peesha_ was _picture_, and dimly I was wondering if our
own race had once known this strange art of arranging dyes on walls.
Certainly the similarity of the two words would indicate something of
the sort.

He led me to one of the pictures--I will use this other word from now
on--and held up the torch so that I could see it well. There was none
of the frozen water at all in this place. The things were done in large
squares on the rock wall, just as in the first underground grotto, but
there was no _glaa_, nor was any of the slippery curious stone set
around them. These walls were rougher and less shining.

The first one was very old, faded, flaked here and there so that the
barren rock showed through. It portrayed a scene in just such a place
as the plain above had once been, and as I had seen in a number of the
other pictures. Tall inclosures rose into the air, with more lines of
openings across them than I could count. Strange birds flew above them,
looking stiff and featherless and glittery. If there were people on the
ground, they were too small to be seen.

Gently he urged me to the next. Here was a scene among the walls, with
people moving about. They looked very like my glen-folk, excepting
always for the odd garments they wore, which covered all of their
persons but the faces and hands. Even upon their feet they seemed to
have garments.

The third picture was terrible. In its ancient much-faded colors it
showed many men fighting. Not fighting bears, or cave cats, but _other
men_. Yes, here were dead men, with blood upon their breasts, and
others were locked in fierce combat. I turned from this view with a
sickness pulling at my belly, and Dy-lee felt much the same, for he
threw a hairy arm over my shoulders and bent his head sorrowfully even
as I.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next few pictures were all the same, men slaying one another,
often with strange stick-like things, the nature of which I could not
imagine. From the attitudes it was plain that when one was pointed at
a man, the man died. It was some form of magic, such as an ogre might
dream of.

Then we came to a picture which defied my comprehension for many
minutes. It was a place of high walls and inclosures, over which
flocks of the curious stiff-winged birds flew; and many of the tallest
inclosures were toppling, while fire raged in among them (I knew it was
fire by the marvelous crimson and scarlet of the colors, dimmed though
they were), and great clouds of smoke rolled out.

There were others. I disliked them, I loathed them, but I could not
keep myself from looking intently at each one. It was impressed on me
that this was no legend, but a true thing that had happened in the far
olden times. These were my people dying, at the hands of others of my
people. I could not understand, but I could feel the truth of this
thing.

Men slaying men! The legend of Sunset Fields had not lied!

On the second wall there was an enormous picture, full seven paces
long and as high as the roof, and this one I could not grasp though I
studied it for a long time. It was a place such as this plain--once
there must have been many such, in the far olden times--from the center
of which there sprouted up a great mushroom, like those in the Fearful
Forest, but all creamy-white and so big as to shatter the imagination.
I cannot say how huge it was. All our glens and valleys would be hidden
in the shadow of such a mushroom. Though I looked at it until my eyes
watered, and Dy-lee had to light his third flambeau, still I could
not understand how such a thing could grow in the midst of the tall
inclosures.

The next picture I could grasp, however. They were of ruins, like those
below which we stood, and all among the ramparts and broken walls were
the bodies of men. Some calamity had laid its dreadful hand on the
place. I wondered if the giant mushroom had been to blame, wreaking
this havoc as it grew.

And now the pictures were different. No more men slaying men, or tall
majestic structures spearing the very sky with their tops, but only
ruins and blackened plains, raw cliffs and far-flung wastes, the
wreckage of great metal things I did not recognize, and among them a
few, a very few human figures, prowling like jackal-rats furtively in
the chaos. These pictures were all very ancient, with their dye-stuffs
flaked and marred by time.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a view of a prairie, waving with orange grass, on which moved
men who might have been my own tribe. Naked, with bows and hatchets,
they stalked an animal something like a cave cat, which had a great
mane of hair all down its back. I touched this picture and nodded to
Dy-lee. He pointed to me. He knew that these were my kindred. And this
picture too was older than the oldest man of the glen-folk, for it was
much dimmed and discolored.

Down the walls I went, and now the pictures seemed to be less ancient,
and in them I saw a weird change coming over the race of men, for they
grew more hairy, and leaving the fields and pleasant glens (why, I
wonder?) they appeared to take up their homes in the blighted places
and in the caves of the raw red cliffs. Time passed, the pictures were
brighter and less flaked, and mankind was furred as a beast, growing
little by little to look like my friend, Dy-lee.

This series of pictures I pored over for a long time, going back and
forth along the wall, judging the age of each in relation to the
others; and I could not apprehend why, but it was true--these men were
the same race, but growing shaggier in every succeeding picture. How
long was the time gap between the pictures? A generation, a hundred
years, a thousand? I could not tell. I went back across the floor to
look at the earliest pictures, those in which men fought together.
They exuded the aura of an incredible antiquity. And what of those in
the other cavern? Their dyes were more brilliant, newer looking; yet
the people were dressed in the queer garments that I saw in the oldest
portrayals here. Did it mean that there were folk existing even now
like them--folk impossible to believe in!--or simply that the dyes in
their pictures were better and lasted longer than these? There were
many things here that I could not understand, and I felt small and
stupid and as young as the youngest pink rabbit with still-blind eyes.

Dy-lee made a speech then, indicating that I should look at the final
pictures; so I left my speculation and came to him and gazed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here, immediately after the series in which mankind grew hairy, was a
large square with dyes that were still vivid and clear, though it still
seemed quite an ancient picture. It portrayed a number of Dy-lee's folk
crouching amid the ruins, perhaps of this very plain above our heads.
Their attitudes showed perfectly that they were afraid, for they drew
back, with arms about their females and young ones. Then, in a cleared
space, there stood a man of my own race, smooth-skinned and wearing
the raiment of a guardian, the long fringed black fox pelts hanging
from his waist and the short mantle of white hares' skins about his
shoulders. He faced away from the cave folk, with his arms lifted in
just such a mystical gesture as I had often seen the guardians making;
and beyond him, from the edge of an especially well-limned forest,
there arose a being whose every line suggested evil--evil beyond the
power of words. There was no definite outline to the thing. It appeared
to change slightly even while I stared at it, as though the dyes had
been mixed with smoke or mist. It seemed to have horns, and then when
I looked again, the horns had vanished. There were great columns of
legs, and arms that hung loosely before its chest with an indescribable
air of menace. Perhaps there were two sets of arms. I could not tell.
It is strange to speak of a picture this way, for after all it was but
dyes of many shades laid upon rock; but all I could recall definitely
about the evil being, when I had turned away, was that its color was
that of a dead fish's belly, and that from its amorphous head there
blazed out two terrible eyes of purest lambent flame.

The import of this whole picture was inescapable. Here were the
shaggy folk, here was a guardian of my own people, and here was a
representation of one of ...

_The Nameless!_

       *       *       *       *       *

For long minutes I stared at my new friend Dy-lee, while the thoughts
churned in my brain. At last I shook myself, as a bear does on coming
out of a cold stream, and I began to try him with questions, partly in
gestures and partly in words which I hoped he might understand. First
I pointed to the shaggy folk. Yes, they were his people, he signed.
Then I indicated the guardian. He pointed at me. I shook my head.
Indicating my rough loincloth of cave cat fur, I showed him the rich
black and white apparel of the little figure, and then touched my bow
and quiver, my hatchet, my knife. No guardian carries a weapon of
any sort, as the beasts will never molest one of their craft. Dy-lee
seemed to know this, for he nodded vigorously, but then showed me
where we were similar--the brown furless face and body. I said, Yes,
that this man was of my people, but differing from me in profession.
He understood this. I asked him, after several tries, whether he had
often seen such men as this; and he signed to me, Yes, that there was a
place of meeting on the plain. I then asked if he had thought I was a
guardian when he first found me the afternoon before, and he answered,
No, pointing to my bow and hatchet.

These folk having no weapons, I was at a loss to know how he had
recognized what mine were for; because the instant I had thrown up
my bow he had seen I meant to shoot, first him and then his tame
dogwolves. But after a moment's thought I remembered that in two or
three of the old pictures there were depictions of the bow and arrow. I
went back down the wall and found them. Evidently these people had once
known the use of such things, for here they were, rather hairy but not
yet covered with the thick shag, stalking a deer with bows. Somewhere
in their evolving they had either lost the art or found a better. Here,
in a later picture, they were hunting a great knifetooth bear. Ah, that
was it; they had domesticated the dogwolves, and given up the bow. I
imagined that it might have come in handy to protect themselves, for
surely they could not always travel amongst a howling pack of their
canine friends; but obviously they had discarded it entirely.

I returned to the startling picture of the guardian, and pointing to
the horrid figure of The Nameless, I bent my head in pantomime and gave
an exaggerated shudder.

Dy-lee repeated my motions exactly, and pointed away to where I
imagined they dwelt. He said something, apparently his name for the
beings. I said, "The Nameless." Again he shivered--it was a real
reaction this time--and pointed east.

       *       *       *       *       *

East? But that was the direction in which lay the Fearful Forest, the
three brooks, Sunset Fields, and my own glen. I had not realized this
at his first motion, being somewhat confused by the underground cavern.
I shook my head, pointing west. _There_ dwelt The Nameless.

He would have none of that. No, they lived to the east. I pointed west,
he pointed stubbornly east.

But _I_ came from the east! If there were such beings in that
direction, would I not know it? I tried to tell him this, showing that
I came from there; very well, said he in signs, so did the guardians,
and I was obviously a relative, a son perhaps, or at least a member of
the tribe of the guardians. Yes, I agreed, but....

I gave it up. Could I still be confused by this roof that shut out the
sun? Hastily I looked at the last of the pictures, which were scenes of
hunting and domesticity, with one more guardian at the end, though not
with one of The Nameless; then I signed to him that we should leave the
place. He scrambled up to the opening and I followed, the daylight from
the high entrance hole of the inclosure above striking my eyes sharply
after the torch's flickering gleam. The dogwolves roused themselves and
nosed our hands as we came out among the broken stones.

"There!" I said, showing him the west; and, "There!" said he, in his
own language, thrusting a dark furry finger eastward. Could we be
talking of different things? No, there had been the guardian and the
changing figure of horror.

_The guardian?_

What had a guardian been doing here? And the one picture had been old,
but the other fairly recent, or I knew nothing of the manner in which
dyes fade with age!

These hairy folk had seen guardians, not once in the dim past, but
evidently often, and recently; had not my friend signed to me that
there was a place of meeting, out on the blackened plain? No wonder
that Dy-lee and his folk, while charmed with my singing and interested
in me, had shown no overwhelming wonder. So the guardians knew, had
perhaps always known, that here in the ruins and the raw red cliffs
there lived another race of men!

       *       *       *       *       *

I sat down on a flat rock and puzzled the matter over, beginning
with what I conceived the early history of these people--of both our
peoples--to have been. A terrible killing among men, with many strange
weapons that spread slaughter wholesale, resulting in a leveling of
their huge structures and a splitting of the race into two parts, one
remaining in places like this, the other going into the distant glens
and plains. The folk of the ruins gradually becoming hairy--could it
be because nature saw they needed protection for their tender flesh,
living as they did in caves? The thought made me open my eyes with
my own cleverness! Then the discarding of weapons and the taming of
the dogwolves. I wondered if they had thrown away _all_ weapons, or
whether they had some secret slaying tool for their defense? Or a magic
ointment to rub on their bodies? Or what?

To this point it all seemed clear, and while it was a thing to churn
the imagination, still it was a plain and possible happening, not
destroying any concepts or deepsunk training of my youth; because no
man of my folk knew whence we had come, or anything of our history save
that it had always been, so far as our elders knew, the same as it is
now: easy and pleasant, with no enemies save the beasts of prey, and a
mate for every man and woman.

But then came the problem of the guardians. These folk knew them too.
They passed between us, it was clear, living with us of the glens but
visiting these of the caverns. I tried Dy-lee with a question: did he
know there were many, many more like me, living beyond the Fearful
Forest? I made a mark in the gritty dirt with my knife point, showed
him that it stood for myself, then made a great number of similar marks
beside it and pointed east. He understood. He could scarcely believe
at first, but after a period of astonished grunts and reassurances, he
believed. There were many like me, over yonder to the east.

Then something took him with eagerness, so that he nearly burst
with what he could not tell me; and at last he ran furiously away
to his cave, leaving me to sit with eyes popping till he returned
with a bag made of hide. From this he took a number of little bones,
hollowed and corked with plugs of wood, and some sticks tipped with
carefully-trimmed stiff feathers. Sensing that I would be curious,
he handed me one of the bones. I pried out the plug and saw that the
hollow was full of a green-blue dye, mixed, as I had suspected, with
something to make it stiff and thick. As I sniffed at it and touched
my fingertip to it gingerly, he set to work on the flat stone beside
me, dipping his feathered stick into first this bone and then that one,
making marks upon the cold rock. I watched the dyes spread and grow
into the shape of a man.

Dy-lee, my friend, was a maker of pictures!

I embraced him. I was overcome with his genius. That this
animal-looking fellow could himself make the wondrous _peeshas_!

       *       *       *       *       *

Impatiently he motioned to me to be seated while he worked. I sat down
and, hoping to repay him for the pleasure I took in his craft, I began
to sing. He nodded vigorously and chuckled. We were enchanted with each
other's accomplishments.

Watching him, I saw the roughly outlined form of a man grow into a tiny
likeness of myself, with hunter's loincloth and bow. He prodded me with
the stick, quite unnecessarily. I could see that it was Ahmusk there on
the flat stone.

Then hastily he made pictures of two others, one of which seemed to be
his conception of a female of my race. Hesitantly then, he pointed
east.

I told him, Yes, and flickered my fingers to show that there were many
of us there. His thatch-shaded eyes blinked with amazement.

The next picture was that of a guardian, with black and white furs and
stern mien. I said the name aloud, and he said something like "rees,"
which I took to be "guardian" in his tongue.

With this series of pictures to aid us, we could make our queries
clear to one another. I asked how many of these guardians he had seen
or knew; and he answered, Fifteen or twenty. There being twenty-four
guardians living in our glen, I knew that all of them, or nearly all,
must at one time or another come here to commune with the hairy folk.

I asked whether they ever lived with his people, and he said, No, that
they lived beyond the woods somewhere, he thought perhaps in the sky. I
managed to make him understand that they lived among my people, and he
seemed surprised that they had never told his folk of us.

Then he made a curious little vague shape beyond his row of pictures,
which I could not fathom until he had dyed in two glowing fiery eyes;
when I knew that this was meant for one of The Nameless. I asked if he
had seen such an ogre, and he signed, No, that no man ever had except
the guardians; and that to see them was death.

Then as well as I could I showed him that we knew of these things too,
calling them The Nameless. His word for them I could not dominate,
though he said it several times.

       *       *       *       *       *

I wondered how he knew what they looked like, having never seen one;
but remembered the picture in the second underground inclosure. Then I
thought of the shadowy outlines of that thing, and it occurred to me
that this was possibly but a common symbol for the beings, as no man
knew their exact form. It was such a picture as a man might make, who
knew only that The Nameless were terrible, evil, beyond all thought
malignant.

I then asked him whether the guardians protected his people from The
Nameless, and he said that they did. I told him by signs that this was
their function among us. He did not seem surprised, but again signaled
that they had never spoken of me and my tribe, and over this omission
he shook his head till the lank hair nearly stood on end.

I told him that we, too, had not known of _them_. He sat with his chin
in his palm, biting his lips over this.

I stared at the lightly-dyed portrayal of The Nameless. I pointed to it
and to the west.

He laid a hand on my shoulder, as one might to a child when it is
making up a wild tale, and pointed eastward.

We sat looking at each other and making these silly gestures back and
forth, until in one fearful flash of knowledge it came to me what the
truth was.

The taste of this knowledge was at once bitter and sweet to me: sweet,
because it blotted out in an instant the only great fear of all my
race; bitter, because it showed me that for many generations both this
man's people and my own had been hoodwinked, shamed and overlorded by
the members of a single useless profession. For it had come to me that
now I knew who The Nameless truly were.

Dy-lee was one of The Nameless, and so was Zheena his mate, and great
grizzled Dy-veece, and every member of that merry clan with whom I had
eaten and slept the night before....

Dy-lee was one of The Nameless, and so was--Ahmusk the hunter.

       *       *       *       *       *

It must have taken me an hour to tell my friend this terrible,
wonderful truth which I had discovered. But finally he realized it,
and at first his wrath was dreadful to behold, and then he saw the
happiness in it and he danced for joy among his dogwolves.

The simple fact was that for no-one-knew-how-long, the guild of
guardians had kept our two races apart and in horror of the things they
called The Nameless, for reasons I could not then even begin to guess;
had kept us apart by tales of monsters which existed only in their own
minds. For the first time in my life I knew pure black hatred of fellow
humans. Had I had the guardians there at that moment, I would have
slain them all.

Yes, Dy-lee's people were The Nameless; and my glen-folk were The
Nameless to him, under whatever exotic name he called us. Nothing could
be plainer, for why else would he think The Nameless lived to the east,
while I had been taught they lived in the west?

Now in my rage it came to me why Laq had shot at me in the Fearful
Forest, and later had pinked Halfspoor with an arrow to make the bear
attack me. He did not dare allow me to make friends here with the hairy
folk. It would topple him and his entire crew of liars and rascals.
He might have halted me yesterday afternoon with a word, but there
was Lora, whom he coveted. He had had a bow, a thing no guardian ever
owned--he must long ago have stolen it and some arrows, to practice
until he thought himself skilled enough to slay me. It did not seem
incredible now that he would plan to kill me for her. Nothing seemed
strange in the light of my new discovery. The world was topsy-turvy,
and surely all things must be possible to one of his loathsome breed.

After we had stamped about for a while, talking furiously and
incomprehensibly to each other and shaking hands with fervor and
startling the dogwolves into howling many times, we went up to Dy-lee's
cave, where he called in all those of his folk who were nearby, and
laying his hand on my chest, he solemnly told them that I was one
of those creatures whom they had all feared for so many years. The
turmoil was frightful. Then, before they could flee, he shouted to them
what he had discovered. Of course it took much less time than it had
when I explained it to him, for he shared his language with them and
needed no elaborate signals. You never heard such a roar as went up
when he had finished.

It was decided, to be brief, that Dy-lee should accompany me back
through the Fearful Forest to the glens, and there we two would
confront the guardians and fling their lifetime of lies into their
teeth. I gathered also that he would protect me on the journey from
wild beasts, though how without weapons he could do this, I did not
see. At any rate, he bade farewell to Zheena and I shook hands all
round and we started out across the ruins, with Dy-lee's two poorts,
the tame dogwolves, running before us with their scarlet tongues
lolling out and their noses in the air.

As we went toward the Fearful Forest, I struck up a song; and to its
rhythm we marched bravely and in high genial comradeship.

       *       *       *       *       *

The oppressive woodland closing in upon us, at about the first hour
after the zenith of the sun, my song died away on my lips; and we began
to converse together, partly in signs and partly in words. Besides
those our languages shared, we had learned a number of one another's
common words, and now questions and answers were more readily
understood.

I asked him if the guardians had ever seen the pictures which he had
shown me. He said that he was not sure, but that he believed not, at
any rate not in his lifetime. They never seemed interested in anything
except being fed and catered to, and did not spend their nights in
the caves as I had done, nor had they ever sung to the hairy folk. I
gathered that Dy-lee had shown me the pictures out of gratitude for
the delight he had taken in my songs. It was the first time I had
ever gotten anything for my voice except a kick in the rump. I was
exceedingly pleased.

Then he put to me a number of questions about my people, and as well as
I could I answered them. We discovered another mutual word, which was
"thorn," when I pried one from his foot with my knife.

Then I thought of weapons, and showing him my metal blade, I asked if
he had not seen such things before. He examined it--I think he had
wanted to for hours, but was too polite to ask for it--and said that
such a knife was unheard of. I had already noticed the flint daggers
his people used, which were flaked to make a cutting edge of a sort,
but were really sharp only at the tip. My bow and arrows and my hatchet
he had seen in his ancient pictures, but mine were the first he had
ever handled. His hands were clumsy on them, and I should have hated
to let him loose a shaft anywhere in my vicinity.

By signs and a few phrases I told him how we heat and mold the metal
for our few needs, and he was intrigued but a little skeptical. Did he
never hear of heating metal to make anything? No, he said, never.

       *       *       *       *       *

But surely he knew of metal? Yes, he said, there were metal instruments
in use among his folk, but these had always been in existence, and no
man living knew the trick of making them. Then he brought out from some
hidden pouch or repository under the long hair on his side a thing like
a bright bronze bone, a small tube of metal with a hole at each end,
curiously shaped and carved with tiny marks that made no sense, for
they did not seem to be pictures or designs of anything at all. With
this, he told me, as I examined it, he would protect me if animals
should attack us; but when I asked him, How, he only smiled and laughed
to himself. I presumed he meant to surprise me, and did not press him
for details; which must have made him feel rather disappointed, for he
put away the tube with a snort.

And these, I asked then, were the only weapons his folk had? Yes, he
said, they needed no others. But if he should lose his? There were
others, many others, hidden in the caves. But in time, I said, surely
all of the mysterious instruments would be gone, some lost, others
destroyed by accident; and then what would his people do? For they
could not make others, that was obvious.

Well, I could not make him understand this query. He did not seem to be
able to visualize the distant future in the slightest degree. There had
always been the tubes, and so far as he knew, there always would be the
tubes.

I gave it up, and privately decided that I would make him and Dy-veece,
and some of the other males, learn the rudiments of archery, whether
they liked it or not.

We tramped on, and the Fearful Forest depressed us with its grim dark
trees and lack of sunlight, until at last we spoke no more to each
other, but traveled as silently as the two great dogwolves. And so it
was that we came upon Halfspoor where he sat in a glade feeding on the
body of a jackal-rat, and did not warn him of our coming until we stood
face to face with him across some twenty paces of the rotting carpet of
vegetation.

Halfspoor gazed at us, and we, paralyzed, gazed upon Halfspoor; and
he gave a grunt and a bellow, and leaping to his hind feet he came
charging down at us.

I sent one arrow into his chest before I turned to dash back down the
trail. I had it in mind to get amongst the trees before I fought, for
here there was nowhere to dodge, and dodging was my only defense
against the giant brute. Dy-lee was fumbling at his side, and the
dogwolves were leaping toward the knifetooth bear. I shouted to Dy-lee
to seek cover, though I knew he would not understand the words. I saw
a man in pelts of black and white moving furtively from the path some
hundred feet behind us, and I knew that a guardian had been following
us eastward. Then something took me across the shoulder blades with a
slap like a tree falling, and I was hurled six times my own length into
a patch of stabbing briers.

       *       *       *       *       *

Even as I hit I was scrambling sideways, intent on reaching the other
side of the nearest tree; a hundred thorns were ripping my flesh, and
my back felt as though it were half broken. My ears were throbbing, I
supposed from the jolt of Halfspoor's blow. I tore myself out of the
briers, leaped with a pounce like a cave cat's across an open space and
took up a position of belligerent waiting behind a lichen-wrapped trunk.

Halfspoor, had he followed me up at once, could have slashed me apart
before ever I got out of the clutch of the thorn bushes. He had
stopped, however, on the spot where he had slapped me, and was hovering
over Dy-lee making angry swipes at him. I thought for a moment that
Dy-lee was dead or unconscious, for he was huddled down in a dark
mass at the bear's feet. The dogwolves were harrying Halfspoor, one
snapping at his legs, the other leaping to get at his throat. I made
a grab over my shoulder and discovered that the quiver was empty. My
arrows had been scattered on the ground when I flew into the briers.

As the bear was not even looking my way, I ran into the open to get
a shaft or two. I would have attacked him with my hatchet, but since
the vital spots of his skull and neck were a good twelve feet off the
ground, it would have been a futile and stupid gesture.

An arrow discovered, I drew back the cord and sank another shaft in
the bear's massive chest. Even as I shot I realized that something was
singular indeed. Although Halfspoor towered over Dy-lee, who crouched
unprotected on the earth, and though the bruin was cuffing in his
direction, yet the blows were missing Dy-lee by several feet at the
least. All that the bear need do was take one step forward on those
gigantic pads and bend his back a trifle ... and there would be no more
Dy-lee. But that step and that bend he did not seem able to accomplish!
Like a fox caught in a trap, he swayed and screamed his fury, but did
not touch my friend Dy-lee.

[Illustration: It would take more than one arrow to slay the huge
Knifetooth. Could he do the impossible?]

When my arrow struck, he turned toward me and gave a bawl of horrible
anger. Even as I snatched up the only other arrow I could see and
darted for my tree, I caught a glimpse of Dy-lee jumping to his feet,
evidently unhurt. The dogwolves hampered Halfspoor, and I made the tree
a second before the old devil reached it.

       *       *       *       *       *

He came round it after me, and I dodged about to keep it between us,
taunting him loudly. This was a game at which I was past master. I
could dive and scuttle all afternoon, if need be.

Then with horror I saw that Dy-lee was coming toward us. I bawled at
him to go back--he would not know the words, but surely my frantic
motions could not be misunderstood--and then in desperation stood my
ground and shot my bolt at Halfspoor at a range of about five feet. It
was the third one to flesh itself in the barrel of his chest, but I
doubted that any of the three would prove mortal. Ribs and iron-hard
muscles would stop them from penetrating too deeply.

Dropping like a stone, I then bounded straight between his charging
legs; was struck glancingly by one hind paw and whirled over and over
in the rotten humus. My hatchet found its way by old instinct into my
hand as I rolled. Then I leaped to my toes and--collided with Dy-lee!

Memory of that instant is muddled. I know that I almost struck my
friend down before I realized who he was. I saw Halfspoor in a kind
of bloody haze, seeming to fill the world above us. Then Dy-lee put
a hand to his mouth and the great bear fell back a pace, snarling and
swatting the air. My head rang and I realized that there was blood in
my eyes. I wiped them clear and lifted the hatchet as I backed away.
The hairy man gripped my wrist and would not let me leave his side. I
thought that he had gone mad, and tugged at him frantically. But he
stood rock-firm, with one hand holding me steady and the other at his
mouth.

All this took but a second or two, and then I ceased to struggle and
only stared at our terrible ursine foe. Halfspoor stood just out of
reach, and his actions were brainless, idiotic. He would slash at us
viciously, missing us by a foot or so; slap at the side of his head
with blows that would have split open a less solid skull; then back
up a little, moan, bellow, gnash his tusks, make as if to charge at
us--and beat his head again!

I glanced at Dy-lee, who seemed calm and detached. The glint of the
bronze tube caught my eye. It was in his mouth and he was blowing
into it. I thought of the wooden whistles we make for our children;
but there came no noise out of this instrument. My head was, indeed,
ringing and pounding from the fight; yet I knew I was not deaf, for
Halfspoor was raising the dead with his uproar and I could hear that
very well.

It was hardly the time for investigation of mysteries, however.
Impatiently I pulled at Dy-lee's arm. The bear would charge. Dy-lee
grinned (at least the hair on his cheeks moved as though he had
grinned), and throwing back his shoulders and inflating his lungs,
appeared to blow a tremendous gust of wind through the metal tube.
The dogwolves, who had been snapping at Halfspoor's toes, writhed on
their bellies and screeched piteously together, as if they had been
disemboweled. Magic! The poor brutes seemed in their last agony.

       *       *       *       *       *

The knifetooth bear gave one frightful, indignant, stentorian yell,
which echoed weirdly from every tree around the glade. He administered
a final pummeling to the sides of his tormented head. And he turned
and made off into the forest as if all the cave cats in the world were
nipping at his tail!

At the same time my eardrums were assailed by the most piercing _feel_
of noise that they had ever experienced. And yet there was no sound
from the tube in Dy-lee's mouth.

Now he removed it, stowed it in his secret pouch, laughed quietly to
himself, and walking across the mold, bent down and began to gentle the
groveling dogwolves. Slowly they responded, sitting up, nuzzling his
hands, and whining as if ashamed of their recent performance.

Listening with one ear while rubbing the other, I heard old Halfspoor
smashing his way through the woodland, complaining bitterly to himself
in a loud voice. I could not blame him. If the stalwart dogwolves were
reduced to impotence by the sorcery of Dy-lee's tube, even bruin must
be pardoned for running from it.

And then I heard a cry of pain and terror, a human sound that rose and
wailed and died to a hideous moaning; and without hesitation I ran off
on the bear's trail. He had found someone else in his mad career, and
that one had not escaped by magic!

It was easy to see where he had passed. Thickets were crushed, even
small trees shattered off, and the bark of the giants shredded by angry
clawings. Perhaps I went two hundred yards. Then I found the man, where
Halfspoor had found him and snatched him up and flung him aside, broken
and dying, into a heap of touchwood.

It was the guardian Laq, and he was dying if ever I saw a man die, with
a broken back and a leg that bent sideways in a way no leg was ever
meant to bend. I knelt beside him and he opened his eyes and recognized
me, and he spat feebly, for there was still hate in the man. I could do
nothing for him, could not even straighten his limbs or ease his head,
for motion would have slain him.

"Lie easy, Laq," I said. "You must rest a while, and then I will help
you home."

"When I have rested, I will slay you, Ahmusk the hunter," said he with
a curse. His hand moved feebly, and I saw he wished to pull the bow
closer, the bow that he had stolen and practiced with until he thought
he was skilled enough to murder me. I put it into his fingers, noticing
without much surprise that it was one which I had made and believed I
had lost somewhere. I gave him one of the arrows from his quiver, too,
and that was a mistake, for he stared sharply at me with his filming
dark eyes. "You think I am crippled," he said huskily, "but I will show
you when I have rested, Ahmusk. Lora will never come to your platform
and your mating furs."

       *       *       *       *       *

I said nothing, for one cannot grow angry with a dying man, and there
was no kind word that my tongue could lay hold on; and so presently he
began to talk in a quiet, sane voice.

"Of course I cannot let you live. You braved the land of the shaggy
people, and made friends with them; and you have a knowledge which must
never be given to our tribes. Men must have something to fear. It keeps
them decent."

I do not know, even yet, whether he believed what he said; and I have
often pondered on it. Perhaps he had made himself believe it, for the
peace of his soul.

"The legend of The Nameless goes on," he said, the bright froth
dripping from his lips. "Ahmusk dies.... My father was a guardian. He
preached to me that some dreadful calamity would occur if we allowed
the two races to come together. All the guardians were taught that. It
was dinned into them from their birth. Only the intelligent ones saw
what that calamity would be. Our craft would lose its privilege, its
honor, its reason for being."

It was the same thought I had held. The guardians fattened on
adulation, and if that was taken from them, there would be nothing
left, for they were so accustomed to it that they could not conceive
becoming as other men.

"It does no harm to tell you these things, Ahmusk, for you will shortly
die. Yes ... you understand, I saw very early that the basic ideas of
my craft were wrong, all wrong. There was no harm in letting you know
of the shaggy people, for they are as innocent and affectionate as
you; the harm lay in the breaking-up of our guild, and the...." He was
silent for so long that I thought he had lapsed into insensibility,
but after a while he repeated what he had said about mankind needing
something to fear. He used the same words, as though it were an excuse
he had learnt by rote long ago.

"That is an untruth," I said. "Fear is evil, fear of anything is all
wrong. It is wickedness, Laq."

       *       *       *       *       *

He looked up at me, and I think the naked truth came to his lips then,
and would not be denied; for he said, with a horrid gasp, "Ah, but
the reverence given us, Bear-throat! This is not lightly to be lost.
Think of it! In all the world we alone are above mankind. A hunter
is the same as a singer, the night watcher gains no more thanks, no
more prerogatives than the weaver of garlands. Only the guardian walks
clothed in honor and mystic glory! Do you think I can let you smash
us to the level of common clay, after so many generations of being
exalted?"

He stopped again, and I thought of the first of his breed, those early
guardians who must have arisen after the terrible slaughters, when all
was hatred and terror and confusion. Did they then invent the legend of
The Nameless, to capitalize on the mutual fear of the two peoples? Did
they, perhaps, force the hairy folk into the wastes and caves, looking
ahead to a reign of vicious knowledge over ignorance? And were all
their descendants as cynical and utterly selfish as this Laq?

"What of your brothers?" I asked him. "Do they know that no true harm
would come if the people knew the truth of The Nameless?"

He laughed, horribly. "My fellow guardians are in the main sublimely
unaware of their futility," he said. "The dogmatic teachings of bigoted
fathers have made unthinking sons.... You understand, Ahmusk, that I
will slay you when I have rested."

"Yes, Laq," I said, as he lay dying.

"Ah, but how I would love to see their bubble of self-importance
pricked!" he muttered. Evidently he felt no kinship with them, but
sneered at them and us alike. "How they would flounder if the facts
were forced upon them!"

I heard Dy-lee come up behind us, and the dogwolves snuffled at my
shoulders. Laq raised himself with a superhuman effort and cried, "The
bear! The knifetooth bear! Ahmusk, the bear comes! My whistle ...
my whistle! I cannot find my whistle ..." and so died, his fingers
clutching weakly at the broken bow that he had stolen so long ago, when
he first plotted to kill me for the sake of Lora.

       *       *       *       *       *

I took the arrows from his quiver, and covered Laq with branches and
dead leaves, for I had no strength to bury him. Returning to the glade,
we managed to find the three arrows I had lost in the fight; then we
turned our faces eastward once more.

We crossed the Crimson Brook and the Blue, and then at last we began to
talk with our signs and our halting phrases.

"What is the tube?" I asked Dy-lee. "How did it drive off Halfspoor?"

As well as he could, he showed me. It was a whistle, of a sort, and
though we men could not hear its note, he explained that the animals
could. A low sound, made by barely breathing into it, brought the
dogwolves barking happily to our sides; but a stronger puff caused them
to howl dolefully. I had seen what a really powerful blast on it could
do to even a knifetooth bear.

"And the guardians have these whistles?" I asked him, and he answered,
Yes, they did, though Laq must have lost his. That was why they needed
no weapons when they strode the Fearful Forest. A man would not have to
slay a carnivore when he could chase it away in fright, with its ears
splitting.

And yet, all I sensed when Dy-lee blew the thing was a tingling of the
eardrums. Strange and new! That an animal could hear a sound which a
man could not!

But still I thought a bow and a few good arrows were not to be sneered
at, and resolved again to teach my friends their use, in preparation
for the time, even though it be hundreds of years hence, when all the
whistles shall be lost.

I pictured Halfspoor in my mind, and how he had stood off from Dy-lee
and swung blows at the air when the whistle blew. I saw him run again,
cuffing his own ears to beat away the tearing, bone-rending sound of
the to-me-silent tube. What a host of miracles I had to tell to Lora!

We crossed the Gray Brook and came to Sunset Fields, and the sun was
less than an hour from its setting in the west. There was a figure
running toward us, now in the waning sunlight, now in the dappling
shade of the tree ferns. I cried out joyfully, for it was my Lora.

She neared us, and seeing Dy-lee and the dogwolves, cried out with
horror. "Ahmusk! Fly, or they will slay you!"

"Come here, little fearful one," I said, "and I will open your mind to
a thousand new things!"

       *       *       *       *       *

She stood there, regarding me, and the fear went out of her eyes, to be
replaced by a vast relief. "Then this creature will not harm you?"

"Nor you either. This is my friend Dy-lee," I told her, and taking
her hand, put it into his. He shook it, and she smiled uncertainly.
"Ahmusk--the dogwolves?"

I patted the biggest on the head. Oh, but that was my hour! "I have
made them gentle as fawns," I said, stretching the facts somewhat.

Then she knew that all was well, and she leaped into my arms and kissed
me until I thought she would never be done; and yet truly I was sorry
when she stopped. "What has happened, Bear-throat? Where have you been
for two days, and who is this, and how does it come that the dogwolves
do not bite, and why are you all blood-smeared, and--"

"Lora, Lora," I said, "I have a thousand things to tell you, but we
can never begin on them if you must chatter endlessly--"

"And Halfspoor, did you find his track, and where will he spend the
night, and--"

"Lora!" I shouted, enfolding her in a fierce embrace. "Listen to me,
and I shall tell you! Great Halfspoor ranges the Fearful Forest, where
I will meet him again one day. This is Dy-lee--"

"And _what_ is Dy-lee?" she asked, her voice rather muffled against my
chest.

I gave up. "I will tell you one thing," I said, "and then I will let
you babble until you run out of queries. I am like a man who has
feared lightning all his life, and has now been struck; and I not only
survive, but have found it a pleasant experience--"

"Where were you hit by lightning? Where did you get all the thorn
scratches?" she asked.

Dy-lee put his hand on my shoulder and said, pointing to Lora, "Zheena!
Zheena!"

By which I think he meant to say that females are all alike, and so,
patting my girl on her shining head, I grinned across at him and
replied, "How right you are, Dy-lee, how very right you are!"

"What did he say?" asked Lora.

"He said that there is nothing in all the fine green world like a
woman."

"Well!" said she, "you've learnt a little wisdom in your traveling, I
must say!"

"A little," said I, "a little."

And so we journeyed homeward to the glen and our people, we three good
new companions, and the dogwolves went before us and gamboled with
pleasure in the soft grass of the fields.

       *       *       *       *       *

That night Dy-lee and I sat together on my platform, in the tawny-cream
light of a full autumn moon. Much had been told that evening, at a
council of all our glen-folk; much had been speculated, much had been
argued over. Some men had been shocked, some elated, some hurt--those
last were the guardians, most of whom could not believe my tale until
I showed them Dy-lee and repeated what Laq had said as he lay dying.
My shaggy comrade had dyed a picture for the folk on a big rock, and
astonished them all beyond measure. Our finest singers had performed
for him, and now he knew that Bear-throat was not such a marvelous
being after all.

Lora and I had announced our mating time. I had three days in which to
find a cave cat and make our rug. Yes, a cave cat; I had decided to
give Halfspoor a rest for a while....

After the initial surprise of Dy-lee's appearance, our people had all
become very much interested in him. He was laden with gifts to take
home to the caves: bone tools and hatchets, metal knives, fine arrows
and bows, skins of white deer and sleek owl feathers, everything they
could think of which he might like.

So now we sat together on the platform of my tree, our legs covered
with rugs against the chill of the night, and our eyelids drooping with
fatigue. Yet must I chatter a while longer, being reluctant to see this
glorious day end.

"Dy-lee," I said, "many wanings of the moon will pass before we see
an end to the changes that are going to happen among our folk, yours
and mine. We will all be one folk soon." He nodded and smiled, just
as though he could understand me. "We have been kept a simple people,
naive and guileless; and that may be good. I think it is, and I think
we will not change our simplicity. We will only see things more
plainly. And there will be less fear."

"Ahmusk," said Dy-lee. "Friend Ahmusk!"

I gripped his hand in the gesture I found so satisfying. "And with
time, Dy-lee, we will find the answers to all sorts of questions,
questions that intrigue me so that I can scarcely wait till morning
to begin searching for the answers! Those whistles of yours, for
instance--who made them, and how, and is the secret of them truly that
their noise pierces the ears and maddens an animal with fear, or what?

"And your pictures, Dy-lee, and our music: we will trade these to each
other and spend a thousand thousand contented hours with them!"

He yawned, and lying down, pulled the furs up to his chin. Still would
I talk a few moments longer.

"And some day, Dy-lee, we will know what caused your folk to grow all
shaggy, while we remained smooth-skinned. Maybe we will find out how
the men of the far olden times moved their great stones, and why they
made the tall inclosures.

"First of all, of course, we must learn to speak to one another. I
shall learn your language, and you shall learn mine...."

"But," put in a grumbling voice from the next tree, "if you do not
close your mouth and go to sleep, Bear-throat, I fear you will not
live to see tomorrow's sun, and so will miss all the fun. Go to sleep!"

I chuckled. It was Lora's father. "Good-night, then," I said. "I shall
wake you early in the morning."

"I'm sure you will. Good-night!"

I rolled over beside Dy-lee and composed myself in my furs for the
night. At once a vast comfortable weariness came over me.

"Perhaps," I murmured, "perhaps we shall even discover some day why it
is that the bones of Sunset Fields do not decay!"

Dy-lee answered me with a soft grunt and then a snore. I laughed to
myself with happiness, and fell asleep in the light of the full tawny
moon.



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Beyond the Fearful Forest" ***

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