I thought of Laq. I should have traced his footprints at the edge of the wood and discovered the truth concerning that arrow.
Shadows....
I was not exactly happy. But I traveled on over Halfspoor's trail, committed to the rash impulsive adventure beyond recall. At one point I passed a lair, dug out beneath one of the shapeless cairns and lined with torn fur, which stunk of dogwolf; the bones of many big hares littered the ground before its mouth, but there were none of the fierce occupants at home just then, and I passed on. There were more signs of beasts hereabouts than one could find in all the valleys back beyond Sunset Fields, and my amazement grew within me. This was not what the guardians had told us concerning the country of The Nameless, they who were doom and destruction to everything that drew breath.
Here was a place where Halfspoor had seated himself to rest, in a corner of the ancient walls. Tiny tufts of grizzled fur were left sticking to the rough surface, where the bear had rubbed his back contentedly over the stones. I inhaled deeply of his scent. He was not far ahead now!
Indeed he was not; less than two hundred cautious paces had I gone when his mighty frame rose before me, towering up beyond a rock so abruptly that I thought he must have heard me and lain in wait. Then I realized, even as my fingers flew in a panic to my quiver, that his back was toward me and he was staring forward and up, making a guttural pleading sort of noise in his chest. I could scarcely shoot him in the back (it would only have enraged him anyway), so I slipped off to the left and crept along behind a low broken wall until I judged I was opposite him. Carefully I raised my head. There he was, all fourteen feet of him, his monstrous head tipped back and his mouth open, so that his twin fangs in profile seemed but a single terrible yellow tusk. I might have lanced an arrow through his cranium then, but ... well, Ahmusk the hunter is no assassin. When the day comes on which I dare not fight fairly, even with a knifetooth bear, then I shall break my bow and take to garland-weaving.
I stared up to see what he was moaning at. Before him at a little distance rose a thing like a flat-faced precipice, which I had been watching and wondering about for some minutes. It appeared to have been constructed, like the low walls I had examined; but its stones were even larger than theirs, and its overall surface much smoother. At regular intervals, and in series of evenly spaced lines, across this uncanny cliff, there ran large square openings, like many blind eyes in an ogre. There were five of these horizontal lines of holes, rising up until the top of the cliff all shattered and craggy put an end to them. I would say this strange erection was more than seventy feet high.
Framed in one of the holes on the second level sat another knifetooth bear, deep brown where Halfspoor was grizzled, smaller than the old scoundrel by a third of his bulk, and—my word on it!—an expression of coyness about her shaggy face that nearly made me burst out laughing. This was the lodestone which had dragged him inexorably over the brooks and through the Fearful Forest, even into the land of The Nameless. A female! A bear-wench!
She glared at him sidelong, her black nose pointed down and her comparatively short two-foot fangs digging into her shoulder; while Halfspoor, giddy and fatuous with love, made his drooling noises of courtship.