plumes of the reeds. He was dressed in breeches of coarse cloth and a skin jerkin roughly stitched together down the sides and across the shoulders. His feet were laced round the ankles into bags of skin resembling ill-shaped boots. He wore a necklace of curved, pointed teeth, and from his belt hung a long knife and a quiver of arrows. His bow, bent and strung, was carried round his neck to keep the butt from trailing in the water. In one hand he was holding a stick on which three dead birds – a crane and two pheasants – were threaded by the legs.
As he reached the shadowed, western end of the island he paused, raised his head cautiously and peered over the reeds into the woods beyond. Then he began to make his way to shore, the reeds parting before him with a hissing sound like that of a scythe in long grass. A pair of duck flew up but he ignored them, for he seldom or never risked the loss of an arrow by shooting at birds on the wing. Reaching dry ground, he at once crouched down in a tall clump of hemlock.
Here he remained for two hours, motionless and watchful, while the sun rose higher and began to move round the shoulder of the hill. Twice he shot, and both arrows found their mark – the one a goose, the other a ketlana, or small forest-deer. Each time he left the quarry lying where it fell and remained in his hiding-place. Sensing the disturbance all around him and himself smelling the ashes on the wind, he judged it best to keep still and wait for other lost and uprooted creatures to come wandering near. So he crouched and watched, vigilant as an Eskimo at a seal-hole, moving only now and then to brush away the flies.
When he saw the leopard, his first movements were no more than a quick biting of the lip and a tightening of his grasp on his bow. It was coming straight towards him through the trees, pacing slowly and looking from side to side. Plainly it was not only uneasy, but also hungry and alert – as dangerous a creature as any solitary hunter might pray to avoid. It came nearer, stopped, stared for some moments straight towards his hiding-place and then turned and padded across to where the kedana lay with the feathered arrow in its neck. As it thrust its head forward, sniffing at the blood, the man, without a sound, crept out of concealment and made his way round it in a half-circle, stopping behind each tree to observe whether it had moved. He turned his head away to breathe and carefully placed each footstep clear of twigs and loose pebbles.
He was already half a bowshot away from the leopard when suddenly a wild pig trotted out of the scrub, blundered against him and ran squealing back into the shadows. The leopard turned, gazed intently and began to pace towards him.
He turned and walked steadily away, fighting against the panic impulse to go faster. Looking round, he saw that the leopard had broken into a padding trot and was overtaking him. At this he began to run, flinging down his birds and making towards the ridge in the hope of losing his terrible pursuer in the undergrowth on the lower slopes. At the foot of the ridge, on the edge of a grove of quian, he turned and raised his bow. Although he knew well what was likely to come of wounding the leopard, it seemed to him now that his only, desperate chance was to try, among the bushes and creepers, to evade it long enough to succeed in shooting it several times and thus either disable it or drive it away. He aimed and loosed, but his hand was unsteady with fear. The arrow grazed the leopard's flank, hung there for a moment and fell out. The leopard bared its teeth and charged, snarling, and the hunter fled blindly along the hillside. A stone turned beneath his foot and he pitched downwards, rolling over and over. He felt a sharp pain as a branch pierced his left shoulder and then the breath was knocked out of him. His body struck heavily against some great, shaggy mass and he lay on the ground, gasping and witless with terror, looking back in the direction from which he had fallen. His bow was gone and as he struggled to his knees he saw that his left arm and hand were red with blood.
The leopard appeared at the top of the steep bank from which he had fallen. He tried to keep silent, but a gasp came from his spent lungs and quick as a bird its head turned towards him. Ears flat, tail lashing, it crouched above him, preparing to spring. He could see its eye-teeth curving downward, and for long moments hung over his death as though over some frightful drop, at the foot of which his life would be broken to nothing.
Suddenly he felt himself pushed to one side and found that he was lying on his back, looking upwards. Standing over him like a cypress tree, one haunch so close to his face that he could smell the shaggy pelt, was a creature; a creature so enormous that in his distracted state of mind he could not comprehend it. As a man carried unconscious from a battlefield might wake bemused and, glimpsing first a heap of refuse, then a cooking-fire, then two women carrying bundles, might tell that he was in a village: so the hunter saw a clawed foot bigger than his own head; a wall of coarse hair, burned and half-stripped to the raw flesh, as it seemed; a great, wedge-shaped muzzle outlined against the sky; and knew that he must be in the presence of an animal. The leopard was still at the top of the bank, cringing now, looking upwards into a face that must be glaring terribly down upon it. Then the giant animal, with a single blow, struck it bodily from the bank, so that it was borne altogether clear, turning over in the air and crashing down among the quian. With a growling roar that sent up a cloud of birds, the animal turned to attack again. It dropped on all fours and as it did so its left side scraped against a tree. At this it snarled and shrank away, wincing with pain. Then, hearing the leopard struggling in the undergrowth, it made towards the sound and was gone.
The hunter rose slowly to his feet, clutching his wounded shoulder. However terrible the transport of fear, the return can be swift, just as one may awaken instantly from deep sleep. He found his bow and crept up the bank. Though he knew what he had seen, yet his mind still whirled incredulously round the centre of certainty, like a boat in a maelstrom. He had seen a bear. But in God's name, what kind of bear? Whence had it come? Had it in truth been already on the island when he had come wading through the shallows that morning; or had it sprung into existence out of his own terror, in answer to prayer? Had he himself perhaps, as he crouched almost senseless at the foot of the bank, made some desperate, phantom journey to summon it from the world beyond? Whether or not, one thing was sure. Whencesoever it had come, this beast, that had knocked a full-grown leopard flying through the air, was now of this world, was flesh and blood. It would no more vanish than the sparrow on the branch.
He limped slowly back towards the river. The goose was gone and his arrow with it, but the kedana was still lying where it had fallen and he pulled out the arrow, heaved it under his good arm and made for the reeds. It was here that the delayed shock overtook him. He sank down, trembling and silently weeping by the water's edge. For a long time he lay prone, oblivious of his own safety. And slowly there came to him – not all at once, but brightening and burning up, littl by little, like a new-lit fire – the realization of what – of who – it must truly be that he had seen.
As a traveller in some far wilderness might by chance pick up a handful of stones from the ground, examine them idly and then, with mounting excitement, first surmise, next think it probable and finally feel certain that they must be diamonds; or as a sea-captain, voyaging in distant waters, might round an unknown cape, busy himself for an hour with the handling of the ship and only then, and gradually, realize that he – he himself – must have sailed into none other than that undiscovered, fabled ocean known to his forbears by nothing but legend and rumour; so now, little by little, there stole upon this hunter the stupefying, all-but-incredible knowledge of what it must be that he had seen. He became calm then, got up and fell to pacing back and forth among the trees by the shore. At last he stood still, faced the sun across the strait and, raising his unwounded arm, prayed for a long time: a wordless prayer of silence and trembling awe. Then, still dazed, he once more took up the ketlana and waded through the reeds. Making his way back along the shallows, he found the raft which he had moored that morning, loosed it and drifted away downstream.
4 The High Baron
It was late in the afternoon when the hunter, Kelderek, came at last in sight of the landmark he was seeking, a tall zoan tree some distance above the downstream point of the island. The boughs, with their silver- backed, fern-like leaves, hung down over the river, forming an enclosed, watery arbour inshore. In front of this the reeds had been cut to afford to one seated within a clear view across the strait. Kelderek, with some difficulty, steered his raft to the mouth of the channel, looked towards the zoan and raised his paddle as though in greeting. There was no response, but he expected none. Guiding the raft up to a stout post in the water, he felt down its length, found the rope running shorewards below the surface and drew himself towards land.
Reaching the tree, he pulled the raft through the curtain of pendent branches. Inside, a short, wooden pier projected from the bank and on this a man was seated, staring out between the leaves at the river beyond. Behind him a second man sat mending a net. Four or five other rafts were moored to the hidden quay. The look-out's glance, having taken in the single kedana and the few fish lying beside Kelderek, came to rest upon the weary,
