Many he slew in his passion, but he brought none of them home, for before the end a strange discovery came to him, and he stood amazed, dropping the haunch which he had cut from his last victim. “It is a whole year,” he said to himself, “that I have not tasted meat; I, a hunter, who love only the meat that I kill!”
Returning home late, he found his wife troubling her heart over his long absence. “Where have you been?” she asked him, and the question inflamed him into a fresh passion.
“I have been out hunting for the white doe,” he cried; “and she carries a spot in her side where some day my arrow must enter. If I do not find her I shall die!”
His wife looked at him long and sorrowfully; then she said: “On your life and soul be it, and on mine also, that your anger makes me tell what I would have kept hidden. It is to-night that she comes. Now it remains for you to remember your word once given to me!”
“Give it back to me!” he cried; “it is my fate to finish the quest of the white doe.”
“If I give it,” said she, “your happiness goes with it, and mine, and that of our children.”
“Give it back to me!” he said again; “I cannot live unless I may master the white doe! If she will come tame to my hand, no harm shall happen to her.”
And when she denied him again, he gave her his bow and arrows, and bade her shoot him to the heart, since without his word rendered back to him he could not live.
Then his wife took both his hands and kissed them tenderly, and with loud weeping quickly set him free of his promise. “As well,” said she, “ask the hunter to go bound to the lion’s den as the white doe to come tame into your keeping; though she loved you with all her heart, you could not look at her and not be her enemy.” She gazed on him with full affection, and sighed deeply. “Lie down for a little,” she said, “and rest; it is not till midnight that she comes. When she comes I will wake you.”
She took his head in her hands and set it upon her knee, making him lie down. “If she will come and stand tame to my hand,” he said again, “then I will do her no harm.”