Then his hand happened to touch his dagger, hanging at his right-hand side; the touch reminded him of something, and he stopped. He wrenched out the knife, his feet stole quickly across the floor and through the doorway. Shortly afterwards the old man was running on the hard snow, stooping, bareheaded, in his blouse, and with long, homespun trousers flapping round his legs.
Before him were the elk spoors, deep holes straight through the rough snow crust, the bottom of them showing the wide-apart hoofs of Rauten, and the grains of snow in the holes were like pearls.
Gaupa saw how the bits of broken snow crust had flown under the elk’s hoofs, and once more he was the old Gaupa. Body and soul were taken back across the years. He was no longer a rheumatic old cripple running bareheaded towards the rise of the sun, knife in hand. No, he was a man with playing muscles and foaming blood, a shaggy savage who hunted an animal to eat it and to clothe himself in its skin.
The snow crust was so hard that he ran as if on a floor, the sound of his steps was only a slight scratching as from a lynx’s claws in bark. He heard the wizard elk just in front, the beast sinking into the snow till under its belly, and inside him was the song that here was Rauten, Rauten! while audibly he mumbled, “I’ve got him now, I’ve got him now.”
Above the spring-black woods of Ré Valley, the mountains foamed like white waterfalls. In the east the rosy dawn glowed, sending a breath of whitish yellow before her on the sky which in farthest west was still deep-sea blue.
There was Black Mountain with its white head, and the forest down its breast like a shaggy beard. Just such a May morning it was when Black Mountain first saw the little elk calf that was to become Rauten.
Now Black Mountain saw something different. On the marsh east of Gipsy Lake an elk bull was plunging heavily in the crusted snow. He tried to leap, but could not. He sank through as if falling at each step and he looked strangely short-legged.
But on the back of that elk sat a man....
Now both Rauten and Gaupa, “The Lynx,” were animals, one born in and of the forest, the other a human being restored to the animal state by the forest. He sat astride of the elk, feeling its lean, sharp back between his legs. His nostrils were full of the scent of game, and he inhaled it and grew drunk from it, like a beast of prey. His hands held on to the mane and one of them held the knife. He lay forwards along Rauten’s neck as if wanting to bite the elk’s throat. Under his nose his beard bristled like feline whiskers.
The marsh was empty again, the elk spoor marking it like a deep scar, and the trees about it seemed to wonder at what they had just seen.