He ate a couple of cold potatoes, a handful of dried venison, a raw onion, and was content. He even decided that he’d manage without a fire in the morning. The smoke of his fire last night had, no doubt, told of his coming; he meant now to see his wild man before the wild man saw him. So he put it to himself as he tethered Buck in the heart of the grove and made his own bed. And he slept, as a man must sleep so often out on the trail, “with one eye open.”
Through the night he dozed, waking many times. He must have slept soundly just before morning. With the dawn he woke again and did not go to sleep. The uneasy sense was with him, as it had been before that something had wakened him. He sat up, listening.
Only silence and the twitterings of the birds awaking with him. And still a sound echoing in his ears which he could not believe had been only the unreal murmur in a dream. He drew on his boots and slipped out of his blankets. He was wide awake and with no wish to go to sleep again. Turning toward the creek, he stopped suddenly.
There was a sound, far off, faint, only dimly audible. A sound which was at once like the call of some wild thing, some forest creature in distress, and yet like the cry of no animal Sheldon had ever heard. He strained his ears to hear. It was gone, sinking into the silence. And yet he had heard and his blood was tingling.
He snatched up his rifle and ran downstream, dodging behind trees as he went, pausing now and then to peer through the early light, hurrying on again.
“This time, if it is you, Mr. Wild Man,” he muttered, “I’ll be the one who does the creeping up on you.”
Two hundred yards he went, hearing nothing. Then again it came, a faint, sobbing cry which, as before, stirred his blood strangely. It was so human, and yet not human, he thought. Less than human, more than human—which? Inarticulate, wordless, a bubbling cry of fear, or of physical suffering? The call was gone, sinking as it had sunk before, and again he ran on, his pulses bounding.
With sudden abruptness, before he was aware of it, he had shot out of the timbered land and upon the edge of the little blue lake he had looked down upon yesterday afternoon. Not a hundred paces from him the breeze-stirred ripples of the lake were lapping upon the sandy shore.
Here was one of those white rocks he had marked at the lake’s side. And here upon the rock, arms tossed out toward the sun, which even as he paused breathless shot a first glimmer above the tree-tops, was “his wild man.”
Clad only in the shaggy skin of a brown bear, which was caught over one shoulder, under the other, stitched at the sides with thongs; arms bare, legs, feet bare, the body a burnished copper, the hair long and blown about the shoulders, was a—girl!