After a while he fell asleep; and, dreaming of the white doe, started awake to find it was already midnight, and the white doe standing there before him. But as soon as his eyes lighted on her they kindled with such fierce ardour that she trembled and sprang away out of the door and across the stream. “Ah, ah, white doe, white doe!” cried the wind in the feathers of the shaft that flew after her.
Just at her leaping of the stream the arrow touched her; and all her body seemed to become a mist that dissolved and floated away, broken into thin fragments over the fast-flowing stream.
By the hunter’s side his wife lay dead, with an arrow struck into her heart. The door of the house was shut; it seemed to be only an evil dream from which he had suddenly awakened. But the arrow gave real substance to his hand: when he drew it out a few true drops of blood flowed after. Suddenly the hunter knew all he had done. “Oh, white doe, white doe!” he cried, and fell down with his face to hers.
At the first light of dawn he covered her with dried ferns, that the children might not see how she lay there dead. “Run out,” he cried to them, “run out and play! Play as the white doe used to do!” And the children ran out and leapt this way and that across the stream, crying, “She was like this, and she did this, and this was the way she went!”
So while they played along the banks of the stream, the hunter took up his beautiful dead wife and buried her. And to the children he said, “Your mother has gone away; when the white doe comes she will return also.”
“She was like this,” they cried, laughing and playing, “and she did this, and this was the way she went!” And all the time as they played he seemed to see the white doe leaping before him in the sunlight.
That night the hunter lay sleepless on his bed, wishing for the world to end; but in the crib by his side the two children lay in a sound slumber. Then he saw plainly in the moonlight the white doe, with a red mark in her side, standing still by the doorway. Soon she went to where the young ones were lying, and, as she touched the coverlet softly with her right fore-foot, all at once two young fawns rose up from the ground and sprang away into the open, following where the white doe beckoned them.
Nor did they ever return. For the rest of his life the huntsman stayed where they left him, a sorrowful and lonely man. In the grave where lay the woman’s form he had slain he buried his bow and arrows far from the sight of the sun or the reach of his own hand; and coming to the place night by night, he would watch the mists and the moonrise, and cry, “White doe, white doe, will you not some day forgive me?” and did not know that she had forgiven him when, before she died, she kissed his two hands and made him sleep for the last time with his head on her knee.