I glanced behind me at the inclosure. Roofless, I had the feeling that it must once have been roofed; there were low piles of rock trash all about, as there would have been had the roof—fallen now—been somehow impossibly made of stone. What prodigies of strength and skill had wrought these incredible walls? I shook my head, and turned back to the entrance.
There was something approaching slowly over the ruined structures to my right. I looked at it with widening eyes. It was about a hundred paces off. For one sickening moment I believed it to be some horrid kind of ogre, made of muck or rotted flesh or some such grisly matter; it seemed slimy and dead....
Then the sun struck it, and I decided that it was simply covered with long trailing dark hair, which glistened wetly in the rays of the dying sun.
It came on, and my knees smote together while my tongue stuck to the roof of my sudden-dried mouth.
In form it was like a man. Indeed, had a man been smeared with black mud, and then been given a coat of heavy hair, oily or permanently damp hair, he might well have resembled this creature. I judged it to be about six feet or a little over, my own height; and so later it proved to be. It moved oddly, with a sort of halting gait, weaving its arms to keep its balance on the jagged rocks. I could see two deep blackish pits in its head where its eyes would be, and matted straggly hair fell lifelessly from its crown. It was naked, like an animal.
I thought of my mother's old songs of the ogre-breed, which can take all manner of shapes, but often emulate mankind, building their frames magically from dead beasts or from the masses of decomposing vegetable matter in the forests. Maybe my first idea had been right, and this was an ogre of mire and pelts, all wickedness.
At any rate, it was coming at me, if rather slowly; and so I put an arrow to the string, being minded to die bravely as becomes a hunter of the glen-folk.
Seeing me raise the bow, it waved at me in protest, and with so human a gesture that I could not shoot it, but only held my weapon ready. It then raised one hand to its face, with something bright in its fingers (it had fingers, I could see, like a man's), and my ears tingled again to the unheard sound or vibration which had bothered me previously.
From the ruins behind it rose the noise of dogwolves barking. It nodded, like a man who would say to himself, That is good. Then it came on with its slow, almost apologetic pace. I lowered my bow. Somehow I felt that it meant me no injury.