The lead had cooled, and Gaupa took out the bullet, fresh and shiny. But it was not like other bullets. It had killed once; it knew its way, and wherever this bullet hit the elk’s body, death would radiate from it as if from a poisoned arrow. Heaven have mercy upon Rauten!
Bjönn again raised his head, whimpering, when Gaupa placed the bullet in the cartridge.
It was four o’clock in the morning. He extinguished the lamp and crept to bed beside Bjönn. Now and then he opened his eyes to look for dawn through the window.
§ 19
That morning an elk bull lay quietly at the upper end of Owl Glen. It was Rauten. He had come from the other side of the valley from the eastern mountains. A dog with a terrible voice in his throat had chased him for half a day, and at last Rauten had swum across Lower Valley River.
But he wanted to go back to Ré Valley, for that was his home. There for months peace reigned in the woods until it entered his own shaggy body and made him at one with the deep silence of the mountains.
Peace was the depth of his nature. He wanted to see, unseen. He liked to stand at the edge of the bogs, looking at the capercailzie hen with all her brood. He liked to see the ever-frightened hare nibbling the grass undisturbed. That was peace, and each day offered fresh joys, however old—a feed of juicy grass not yet withered in some marshy place, a few waterlilies in a mountain lakelet. For him life was food, sleep, and rest, and then feeding again. Life was light and darkness, sun and rain, heat and cold.
He slept at all times of day and night, but as lightly as if even in his sleep all the tiny sounds of the wilderness reached his consciousness. They floated about his ears, and the least unusual crackling let them all into his brain at once, and he was wide awake.
Rauten lived on his instinct—that is, on the experiences accumulated by countless generations through all ages and in all countries. Experiences had glided into him as murmuring brooklets run into the sea.