Here Halfspoor had caught himself a jackal-rat. Said I not that he was a foul feeder? He had torn the scavenger in two and spent five or ten minutes in wolfing down the tenderer portions.
Where was he heading, this temerarious bear? What curious siren call was luring him (and quite possibly me) to destruction?
I paused by a wall, to pick out with the point of my knife a thorn that had been working its way into my heel. This wall, now: it appeared to have been built a-purpose. The base was straight and made of thick square blocks, the upper rows knocked a little out of line but still fairly even. Between the stones was a crumbly, grainy material, and in places it still adhered to the rock in lumps and patches. I scratched my head over it, forgetting Halfspoor. Suppose, now, a man wanted to build a wall of such huge stones—provided he found a way to move them in the first place, for they were enormously heavy—would he not concoct some gummy or cohesive substance with which to hold them together? And in the course of time, of many moons and years, would this substance not possibly harden and then decay, leaving traces such as I now pried away with my thumbnail?
But what would a man want with a wall like this?
A light shone in my mind. Why, if he had such a wall erected across one end of a glen, it might keep the carnivores from his tribe's trees, and there would be no need for more than one or two night watchers!
If I lived to return to our valley, I would lay this idea before my people. It was amazingly simple, and yet new. Surely no one had ever thought of it before.
Well, I went on through the rocky ruins.
Halfspoor was heading for the cliffs. In this bad unfamiliar soil it was hard to judge the age of his traces, but I thought he could not be more than half an hour ahead of me now.
Again a shadow moved just beyond the range of my vision, and again when I looked around it had gone.