Evidently he had fought his fight to a finish, had bellowed, butted and thrust at some more adroit or better-armed youngster (some youth of seventy or eighty summers, maybe), who had worn him down and worsted him, and now, with such holes and rents in his shaggy sides as would have been death to any smaller beast, and were gruesome to see, he had relinquished the partners and pastures of his lusty prime, and was a wanderer upon the face of the earth until death—death which would from henceforth ambush his path and his lying down, for no keenly-interested wives would henceforth watch over his safety. No, with yearly waning powers he must stave off doom as he might, but come it would at length, a grisly onslaught of a horde of lions, a staked pitfall, a snow-hidden morass.
Dêh-Yān shuddered at the sight of his small, red, wicked eye.
"If he gets our wind?" she whispered, in the ghost of a pixie's whisper, and was well pinched for the indiscretion. The giant did not get their wind, he had something else to think of. When he paused for breath close to their cave, they could see the great wall of hairy side twitching with the smart of the raw gashes with which it was scored, the records of that desperate and final conflict, for it is the law of the elephant herd that a dethroned master-bull shall never retry the issue: once down he is an outcast for the rest of his life, and a terror to the twentieth-century jungle, as his collateral ancestor, the rogue mammoth, was to the bleak tundras and mountain forests which were his home in the age of ice.
It was their first sight of a mammoth, the great beasts were already a dwindling race in the times we tell of, the days of the Magdalanian men.
Presently the silent watchers beheld the great panting hero get his breath and resume his travels. Ploughing, heaving, wading through the snow, he faded from sight and silence returned.
"This may be just the luckiest thing in the world for us," said Pŭl-Yūn, "or on the other hand, the unluckiest."
"Um, yes," assented the Master-Girl, thoughtfully, peering forth upon the trail which the passing monster had left. "If he is marching by himself we can take the same line, there is no losing that spoor. He knows the way, be sure of that, and where he can go we can follow—but, he leaves a blood-sign behind him, see!—If a party of tigers, or of grizzlies, strike that trail they will follow it up on the chance of finding the bull in some drift. Or, those Little Moon braves might happen upon it, eh?"
"In any case we must lie close for to-night, no more dark marches for me! and if the morning shows that the bull is travelling unattended, we will use his trail."
"I begin to think we shall do it after all," smiled Dêh-Yān, a little grimly, perhaps, for though she had kept a stiff mouth all day, the prospect was not encouraging, and she, at least, had no local knowledge to fall back upon even if the weather should take up and let them through.
Fortune smiled upon the youngsters. Morning-light showed them the mammoth-track skinned over with a film of new snow unprinted by the spoor of beast or man. The fall had ceased, the drifts ploughed through and pressed down by the bulk and weight of their forerunner, gave easy passage; something in the contours of the ground seemed familiar to Pŭl-Yūn, who silently took the lead, striding ahead with confidence, and presently, suddenly, the change came, the slope eased off, and the glory of the prospect before her rushed to the eyes of the girl who had been toiling up the last ascent bent beneath her load. She had never been so high before, nor overlooked such an extent of country. It caught her breath.