CHAPTER X
THROUGH WHICH THE CHAMPIONS CHASE VINLAND ELK
Through the forest and out like flitting shadows, pausing only to make sure that the trail they were following was fresher than any of those which crossed it. Over a pond and across a bog and zigzag up a hill,—they had not grazed a stone or snapped a twig; it seemed that every stride must bring them in sight of the game. Then, on the other side of the slope, Alrek blundered. Descending at lightning speed, he turned his head to look behind, and in so doing unconsciously straightened his body ever so little from the required bend. In a breath he was seated on the snow while his skees finished the coast without him, at the bottom dashing noisily against a stone. Instantly, from somewhere in the white distance, came like an echo the sound of crashing timber, a sound which passed so quickly that if only one had heard it he might have doubted his ears.
All three had heard it, however; and the two who reached the bottom still shod looked scathingly upon the third as he came plunging down, breaking through the crust to his knees wherever it covered a hollow.
"I advise you to tie yourself on," one of them jeered; and the other one gibed: "Would you like to hold to my cloak in going down the next hill?"
If he would, the Sword-Bearer did not admit it; but it was something that he was reduced to silence. They swung after him in high feather when he was once more on his runners and off across the valley.
Beyond the next rise there was a plain, fringed by a thicket; and there in the packed and trampled snow and the gnawed branches and peeled bark they found yet more tangible proof of what they had lost.
"We should have got a herd if nobody had spoiled it," Gard grunted.
Before Brand also could voice his reproach, Alrek—darting here and there among the trees in search of the new trail—uttered his low whistle and was off like a hare. Like hounds after hare they were after him, and Vinland trees looked their first upon real skee-running.
Speed, not silence, was the object now. More than once their iron-shod staffs rang sharply against the rocks as they thrust out the poles to change their course, rudder-like. Finding coasting too slow now, they took the last half of each hill at a leap. And when a plain stretched its smooth surface before them, or a frozen pond or a marsh, their speed was the speed of a deer at his best.