"For," said Pŭl-Yūn, "we could never get away from this snow-camp without our leg-gear, so we may as well starve clothed and with a hope in our hearts, as starve two days later half-naked with none." And to this the Master-Girl had agreed.
But the situation was far from cheerful and did not conduce to much conversation.
"Hark!—what is that?"
"Hush, on thy life, hush!—we are well hidden."
During their headlong flight from their first halt, and in the course of the various doublings and subterfuges by which the fugitives had hoped to break the continuity of their trail and baffle their pursuers, these youngsters had most effectually lost their bearings. This, their second, and which threatened to prove itself their final camp, was excavated in the side of one among many round-topped drifts which studded a level plain, or what seemed such, for its limits were hidden, it was probably the frozen surface of some small lake, or such another expanse as the Andermatt valley, a green and pleasant place in the summer months, upon which several lateral glens converged, a haunt of the mountain bison and the tall, wide-antlered stag, but in winter a dreary waste avoided by man and beast.
Yet, something was approaching, for the snow, frozen crisply by the evening's chill, crunched beneath heavy feet. There was the deep, rhythmical panting of a huge body labouring hugely. What on earth might this be? Four thoroughly frightened human eyes peered forth from the spy-hole left at the mouth of the snow-cave, and beheld—What think ye? A great, bald, black block of a head, maned at the temples and nape and hung with a pair of shield-shaped hairy ears, was butting through the drifts. A coil of bristly trunk was stowed away between a pair of prodigious tusks which showed yellow amid the whiter snows around them. They were as stout as young beeches and curled upon themselves in such wise that their points were useless to the monster who bore them. This had probably been his down-fall; some younger rival with shorter weapons, shorter and lighter, but with points which could be brought to bear, had ousted this patriarch from the herd. Here was a rogue mammoth upon his travels, setting the height and width of a mountain range between himself and the scene of his disgrace, a Napoleon on his way to St Helena, diswived, discrowned, a tragedy of brute existence. The great heart was hot within him, he was boiling to avenge his wrongs upon the first creature that he might meet, and meantime was working off his fury in tempestuous exertions. What was a fifty or sixty-mile march to the enormous sinews of limbs seasoned by migrations and combats of a hundred and fifty years? His breath smoked around him as he forged his way along, now pawing the snow under him, now wallowing over it, using his huge belly as a raft.
THE FORERUNNER