Rauten stood down there. What was that he heard in the moonlight? The sound immediately begot a picture in his brain. He saw and heard an icicle breaking from a precipice and falling down on to the glacier below. It was broken to pieces and shattered with a shrill clang.... It was the sound of the falling window-pane.
Up in the hut Gaupa took aim. First his aim sought the starry flowers in the sky. Then it sank past the multitude of stars, sank lower and lower, crossed the mountain slope, skirted the lake, stole along the bog, fumbled for the elk’s antlers and found them. There it rested awhile, only to glide downwards along the dark body, stopped again, and remained.
Gaupa’s forefinger crooked. His eyelids did not move, nor did Bjönn’s.
Rauten was listening all the time for that icicle. Then a hot pang in his left shoulder startled him, but the sensation was drowned in a roar of thunder which broke upon the stillness of the night. The elk stretched out and lay flat in the air, touched the earth, and stretched out in the air again. Moonlight streamed between the tines of his antlers when he ran, each leap double the length of his own body. He was chasing a mad shadow in front of him, chasing it into the forest which swallowed shadow and elk alike.
Shortly afterwards something splashed in a lake to the north, and the water spouted white before Rauten where he started to swim. He swam across the lakelet, swam across molten silver. On the farther side he rose, dripping, and ran on.
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