His alert eyes had already detected the trail of bear, and as they moved up the river he clung with Lhatto to the river’s bank, fearing some ambush. They had proceeded on the way a long distance, in which it was most noticeable that the river bed was rising, from its frequent cataracts and long inclines covered with foaming waves, when the fall and splash of water was heard and a waving mist above the forest indicated the nearness of a waterfall.
Ogga had become especially eager, rushing in and out amongst the shrubs, which clustered now, more and more closely, to the river’s brim. At one point he followed a fresh trail which he had discovered, and a moment later a savage growl broke upon the sylvan stillness, and Lhatto ran into the shadows whence the sound issued. She hurried up a winding way half broken through the first undergrowth and finally emerging in the woodland, where its plain outlines led her on until she came to a cliff-side, part of the walls of the valley. Here an exciting combat was in progress; Ogga was holding at bay a brown bear which had retreated to a ledge which it had gained by a flight of most natural steps, and up these steps Ogga was himself slowly ascending, the bear fiercely objecting but awed by the spear which Ogga flourished in his face, and which had already once penetrated his tough sides. The wound the bear had received was a serious one, he was already disabled.
Ogga, encouraged by Lhatto, who clapped her hands with admiration, pressed upon the creature. He had now touched the threshold of the ledge. It was some thirty feet above the stones, talus, and boulders at the foot of the cliff, and the encounter promised to be final, for one or the other. Ogga avoided the thrusts of the animal, keeping it away by savage punches with the spear’s point. The bear realized its predicament as it came nearer to the limit of the rocky table, and reared and ambled forward. It was this moment that Ogga had anticipated; stooping as quickly as the bear rose on its haunches, he drove the ivory javelin into its exposed abdomen. With a deep howl of pain the bear fell sideways and slid from the ledge, dropping heavily almost at the feet of Lhatto, dead. Ogga had held his spear and it became disengaged from the bear, as it tumbled from the cliff. He stood upright, looking down, and there was pride and happiness in his face, and in Lhatto’s there was no less.
Ogga opened the bear, cutting with the sharp nephrite blade broad strips of meat; he took two stones, choosing them carefully from the boulder pile, and gathered a kind of dead wood from the under sides of fallen trees, and bending flat to the ground, blowing softly, ignited the natural tinder with the sparks from the stones. The cheerful flame, nursed with little sticks, grew into a fire, and he placed stones in the heat, piling upon them more wood. At last, with a broken bough, he brushed the fire aside and thrust the bear strips upon the stones, almost covered with fervent cinders. Thus was it cooked, and Ogga and Lhatto, prototypes of the long retinue of woodmen who have found life and wonders and new gastronomic pleasures in the primeval forests, were again made strong and buoyant and resolute. Through the favoring fortune of birth, these two aboriginal lovers carried within their untutored natures, some of the quintessence of noble instincts, and there was between them neither violence nor shame.
Their further progress was prevented by an encircling cliff, high and unassailable. It was over this that the head-waters of the river poured, forming in their descent the falls, whose shattered and buoyant spray floated above the trees. The wall seemed impregnable, a sheer verticality actually leaning forward so that the falls, dripping in a descent of more than a hundred feet, arched forward and left behind them a deep recess, a cold drenched cavern. Into this, behind the thundering solidity of the continuous sheet of water, leaping from the sunlight above, where its coruscating folds entwined, to the rayless depth in the forest-land below, Ogga and Lhatto carefully peered and entered. They were in strange and unusual surroundings; they moved in a sort of semi-conical cave, almost dark from the interception of the outer light by the falls that seemed scarcely translucent. Groping backward to the rock, Lhatto, exclaiming with surprise, called Ogga to her, and showed a crevice running upward in the beds of rock through which a crepuscular light, apparently shining from above, was seen. Hesitatingly Ogga crept into the gash, which was almost dry. He disappeared for a moment, then his voice calling Lhatto summoned her, and the girl crept after him. The crevice, cleaving the vertical schists, ran upward at such an oblique angle, and so discontinuously, being somewhat faulted in its ascent, that without cutting across the floor of the stream it passed the falls, piercing to the light at some point on the table-land above. It was just possible to squeeze through this cryptic passage, but it offered no real danger or difficulty, the very closeness of its parallel sides affording constant support.
Lhatto and Ogga went on, and after some not unusual and helpful exercise, emerged upon an upper elevation, a sort of mesa-land, crowned by the ranges from whose boisterous crests the storm of the last night had descended. They had indeed turned the northern edge of this Sierra and before them, in the purple and indistinguishable shadowed distances, where peaks and minarets and sculptured stone seemed melting together in a vaporous uncertainty, lay the Canyon Country, and far westward, shining in all his ermine and beryl hues, Zit remained unchanged. The Fire-Breather had withdrawn to the earth and again lay still.
And here Ogga and Lhatto rested. The love that ran with increasing ardor through their souls, had now risen to that impassionate chance when each word and gesture of endearment thrust anew upon them the expectation and the opportunity of bliss. The warm night sank breathless upon those verdurous highlands, the fragrance of the pines, the half momentary delicacy of the odors of wild plants, the succoring murmur of the river, the dull lustre of the moon as it rose amongst the phantom-laden fogs, coming from hidden streams in all that creviced and monumental land before them, engaged, in languorous alliance, to give their love its final consecration.
And Ogga, standing by the river and taking Lhatto by the hand, bent himself and her towards the white pallor of Zit, and said—“I take thee for my wife.” And Lhatto, answering, said—“I am yours.”
The earth’s orb wheeled on through its incredible pathway in space, which no consecutive movement through ages and ages shall ever yet define or limit, the agencies of nature sprang to their appointed places in the economy of all things growing, moving and acting; the Eternal Law, with executions blind and patient, fulfilled the Great Intention, and then, as it were, the next instant, the Moon sank on the western wave, the Sun swimming upward in the East flooded the expectant earth with light, and Ogga and Lhatto, awaking, saw the figure of a man standing motionless on the brink of the river.