"What are you laughing at?" her man was asking weakly.
"I was thinking that I must get to my hunting—we cannot live long upon a stoat and a walletful of hedgehogs. Also I am thinking we must have skins for leggings and mittens," smiled the girl, lying glibly to conceal feelings of which she was half ashamed.
The frost had not given, and wild-life, hunger-nipped, was getting over the first paralysing fear of making tracks. The big game, elephants and bison, would have moved down-stream for the winter, and lion would have followed them, and bear laid up to sleep off his fat. She knew as much. The edge of the covert was printed thickly with slot of hare, badger, fox and marten. She could see that chamois and stone-buck had come down, but chamois and stone-buck were kittle cattle. There were the broad pads of a big tom-lynx. The girl looked them over narrowly, and knew them from wolf by the sign of hair upon the soles of the feet. She dreaded lynx, but meat she must have. There among the tangle of creeping pine (the Pinus pumulus which makes such desperately hard going) was the well-beaten run of capercaillie. Dêh-Yān followed it into the scrub as far as a fallen spruce and set that log with twenty springes of deer-sinew, then, fetching a circle, she beat the covert with some small outcry back towards her nooses, and with results. The master-cock, a great black-bearded tyrant, twice as big as his wives, had got a hairy leg into trouble but had broken away, but not before six youngsters and hens, hastening to their lord's assistance, had been themselves ensnared.
"Good!" said the man when the huntress panted up the cliff face carrying an almost throttling necklace of heavy birds, "we have food for days. Give that covert a rest, Dêh-Yān. Also I have another reason. Listen. I dreamed of a hare whilst you were away. Danger is near."
Without a word, weary as she was, the girl left the cave and ascended the rock face, climbing slowly and very carefully, keeping to the bare exposures lest she should leave incriminating sign, and ensconcing herself in a juniper bush, spied far and long over the white expanse.
The dream had already come true. There, below her and more than four miles away by our measurement, three tiny black specks moved slowly across a snow-field between two dark belts of wood.
The girl watched with a hardening mouth, bending upon these crawling black specks the wonderful, long-sighted eyes of a savage. Nearer they came and nearer, she made out and named each. There was Low-Mah, there was Pongu, and, worst of all, there was the detested Gow-Loo, a brave whom she most particularly disliked, and with whose property she had accordingly made free when she left the tribe.
Plainly the man had missed his axes and spears, had revisited the camp where they had last been seen and had not found them. Pongu in like manner had missed his bison-robes, and Low-Mah certain deer-skins, properties which if cast away by girls in a panic-stricken rush would have lain where they fell. Each had his dog with him, and having failed in finding what they sought at the site of the snow-camp, were casting up the glen with a certain air of grim determination which the watcher did not like.
They had reasoned the matter out and had ceased to believe in that bear, albeit, just what had induced an unmarried girl to break away from her tribe and make a winter-hunting of her own was beyond them. It was a matter which needed clearing up.