“He’ll soon be himself again,” thought Gaupa. He had seen epileptics before and knew that such attacks most often end in deep sleep.
But the Swede slept on and on, and Gaupa noticed how his breathing grew fainter. At last he had to lie down close beside the body to catch it at all. The time came when the Ré Valley Swede did not breathe any more. He lay crouching over the plate which was to have been the great adventure of his life. But the pine-log fire burned on beside him red, resinous, and alive.
After that night Gaupa was unable to rid himself of the last words of the old man with the glassy troubled eyes: “in the shape of a beast.”
When evening spread her dark mantle over the sky, when the tree-trunks ceased to be, and he saw the wild beasts gliding like living shadows across the wooded glades, then he heard it: “in the shape of a beast—beast.” And however much he willed it not to happen, his heart would beat in his breast like the sound of far-off muffled guns.
When at dawn he waited for the capercailzie’s love song, the mystical peals of bells of the forest, he heard what he had noticed since his earliest youth: although the silence was absolute, there seemed to be someone talking somewhere, far away in no particular direction only far away. He had often thought of the People of the Hills, for Gaupa believed in them most sincerely; he had both seen and heard inexplicable things, but ever since the death of the Ré Valley Swede the low distant murmur became words, “Beast, Beast, Beast....”
Gaupa was constantly expecting something to happen. The tension of it was like music to his soul. Ever since that time when he watched through the night beside the dead Swede, felt his hands growing cold, saw his lips growing blue, ever since that time the night and the forest seemed to attract him even more strongly than before. The possibilities hinted at by that one word “beast” ran through his brain like an icy trickle, became a sweet pain—“Beast, Beast....”
Gaupa had never known fear in the woods, not even when once he killed a bear cub and the mother bear rushed straight towards him with huge leaping strides—even then he was not afraid. He just sent a bullet through the head when she was four paces away. And it is easy to understand that the last words of the Ré Valley Swede did not frighten him.
Only he acquired a strange habit. After shooting an animal he invariably looked into its eyes. It had become such a confirmed habit that he did not think about it, for ten or twelve years had elapsed since the corpse of the Ré Valley Swede had been carried away to civilisation on the back of a horse, and in Gaupa’s thoughts the memory had grown somewhat blurred. All the same he could at will recall the face of the dead man in the glow of the fire, a face as red as the trunk of a pine tree in the evening sun.
The old Swede had said he would return to Ré Valley in the shape of a beast.... Gaupa remembered what had happened some time before on a farm north in the Lower Valley, a farm where the outlying meadows mingled with the highest birch copses just below the bare mountain.
The farmer’s son married the prettiest maid in all the valley—oh, what a beauty she was!—but pale and delicate as a winter’s moon. And just as the moon dies and vanishes before the light, so life ebbed out of her slowly, oh so slowly. But she clung to life, and she said that if she died she would return to her boy husband in the shape of a bird. And she did die.