And Goshmeelee went.
CHAPTER XXII
THE MOON WHEN THINGS WALK
By signs that were unmistakable, Dusty Star knew that a new, strange restlessness had invaded Kiopo's bones. It was not that he watched the forest borders with suspicion, as before, for an invisible foe. That uneasiness might be there, but it seemed for the present to be swallowed up in a deeper restlessness which preyed upon him day and night. After Dusty Star's return from his Carboona excursion, Kiopo had regarded him with a reproving eye. It was useless for Dusty Star to pretend that nothing had happened. Kiopo never met the Lone Wolf; and Goshmeelee bulging with berries did not blab. Nevertheless, Kiopo knew that the Little Brother had taken the law into his own hand, and that trouble was on the way.
Kiopo could not rest. The Fall had come, and, with the Fall, its wandering impulses. An unquiet itch had got into the skin of things, and into the heart of things a strange desire. Every wild creature felt it, each in its own degree. The Cariboo were off on their vague journeyings that took them half across the world. It was the moon when things appeared and vanished; the moon when travelling voices came out of the north, when a thin sleep covered the earth by day, and when things went out walking at the falling of the night.
Kiopo also walked.
Where he went Dusty Star could not tell. He watched and watched; but Kiopo always eluded him at the coming-on of dusk. Mere hunting did not account for it. The kills he made were not numerous. Often he brought back what barely sufficed for their needs. It was only too clear that something beyond mere hunting occupied his mind.
What made the thing still more peculiar was that, wherever it was Kiopo went, there he also howled. Night after night, about an hour after sundown, Dusty Star would hear the familiar voice raised in melancholy wailing in the distance, as if it resounded from the sides of a gorge.
And as he lay awake, listening to the woeful sound, he would hear, ever and anon, dark voices out of the north, that came clanging above the hollow woods, and making the silence quake. And though he told himself that it was only the first flights of the geese, he could not get rid of the feeling that other voices went along the middle sky, and that the dark was haunted with wings.