Chapter the Twenty-seventh
How Tig chose a Wife from among the Lake People
AFTER his first visit to the Lake Village Tig went sometimes to see his friends there, always taking care to carry with him a present of game of his own killing, a hare or some birds, for Eira and her mother; for he was glad that they should see what a clever hunter he was; and Eira showed him how well she could cook the meat that he brought, and was pleased when he praised her cookery. Dobran and Gaithel took him out fishing, but Tig did not care much for this. However, one day they promised to show him better sport, for a party was going up into their hunting-grounds to hunt deer in a manner of their own.
They all started very early in the morning and marched up into the hills. Then the men spread their party out into a long line, curved like the letter C, and swept across the hill-side with their dogs. Then they closed in, and beat the woods until the hunters on one side started a herd of deer. The deer dashed across the woodland valley and tried to escape on the other side, but the men of the further line turned them back and drove them into the woods again.
So the hunters kept the deer moving forward, always within the line, until they drove them to a narrow place near the end of the valley, where there was a big trap, a high double fence among the trees, made in the shape of a long V. The hunters closed in on the deer and drove them in at the broad open end of the fence, and then drove them on and on until the deer were enclosed in the narrow end, where the ground was soft and boggy, so that they could not leap out.
Then some of the hunters climbed over the fence, and speared or clubbed the poor animals that were standing up to their knees in the soft soil, panting and terror-stricken. In this manner in one day the hunters got eleven head of deer; but Tig thought it was not such fine sport as stalking a stag on the hills, though at the time of the drive, when they were heading the deer down through the woods, it was exciting work.
Then they carried home the deer that they had killed, and they all spent two or three days in feasting.