At first it was difficult to move, but as his stiff body warmed and loosened he forgot his hunger in the delight of going. His man-body had been a pretty good one. It was tough and lithe and quicker than most. But it was a dull, clumsy thing compared to the one he had now.
The body of Asha was sensitively alive, from the bottoms of its padded paws to the tip of its nose. Every nerve and muscle worked to a hair-trigger reflex. It could thread its way like a lightning-flash through a thicket of brush and never so much as stir a leaf. It could stop stock-still without a quiver and it could soar over a deadfall like an arrow going home. And it could run. Gods of the forest, how it could run!
Nelson had known that when they drove him out of Vruun. But there had been no pleasure in running then. Now he sped down the open ridges for the sheer joy of it, rushing through the pools of moonlight, whirling and pouncing, playing delightedly with the shadows.
Hysteria, Nelson thought. Bravado, reaction against fear. But why not? Why not?
He crept upwind upon a little band of deer feeding by a pond. For a time he lay in the long grass and watched them, slender lovely things with their moist black noses and great eyes. A tall buck and two does and a fawn. The rich sweet odor of them made his mouth water.
Presently he rose and walked boldly out into the clearing. They lifted their heads and froze, staring at him-fleet-limbed children of flight and fear. Then they snorted the wolf-taint out of their nostrils and were gone.
He went to the pool and drank. His reflection looked up at him from the moonlit water, and he ran his tongue over his teeth and glared back wolf-eyed at himself.
He went southward again, ever southward toward An-shan, and he found no rabbits. He began to be aware that the game was moving. Time and again he crossed the new trails of deer and smaller beasts, all drifting westward. Word had gone through the forest that even the true beasts who were not of the Brotherhood could understand, and they were moving on both sides of the river, back to the barrier cliffs, leaving the forest to the Clans.
The wind, which had been blowing steadily from the south, dropped and then died altogether. Nelson felt a strange muffling of his senses then. It was like being partly blind and deaf because he could no longer tell what was happening upwind. He moved with increased caution and he was hungry, very hungry.
He came down to the edge of a wide shallow stream and suddenly, with a flying clatter of hoofs, a dappled mare and her foal came splashing across the fiord and up the low bank beside him.