As his eyes shifted downward, a huge mound of brown fur rose against them, hiding the landscape. It was the carcass of the bear which lay across his legs, burying them from the waist down.
"I can't move it," the girl told him. "Oh, are you badly hurt? Can you take a drink of water? I'll lift your head!" She spoke all in a breath, tremulously, for she had considered him almost a dead man. She lifted his head from where it lay in her lap, and held an old tin can full of spring water to his lips.
Angus drank and felt better.
"I don't think I'm hurt much," he said. "Where is all the blood coming from?" He put his hand to his head, touching gingerly a four-inch rip in his scalp. There was a pain in his side which was worse when he moved, but he said nothing about that and otherwise he could find nothing wrong.
"You must get out from under that brute," the girl told him. "I've tried to pull it off, and I've tried to pull you out, but I'm not strong enough."
She stooped behind him, her hands beneath his shoulders, and he drew his legs clear of the weight. When he got to his feet he was giddy for a moment and leaned against her for support. With her assistance he got to the spring, and washed off the coagulated blood, while she made a bandage of their handkerchiefs and fitted it deftly. The icy water cleared away the last of the fog, and save for a growing stiffness and soreness he felt well enough. He looked at the girl who sat beside him on the brown grass and wondered who she was and where on earth she had come from.
The girl was tall, and clean and graceful as a young pine. She carried her head well lifted, which Angus considered a good sign in horses and human beings. A mass of fair hair was coiled low at the base of it and drawn smoothly back from a broad forehead. Her eyes were a clear blue which reminded Angus of certain mountain lakes, and yet a little weary and troubled as if some shadow overcast them. Her smooth cheeks, too, were pale, with but little of the color that comes from the kiss of wind and sun. She was an utter stranger to him, and yet there was something vaguely familiar.
The fact was that he was staring at her. She met his gaze evenly.
"Do you know that you are lucky not to be badly hurt?" she said.
"It would have served me right if I had been."