I slung my bow over my shoulder, but took the precaution of grasping my bone hatchet. The dogwolves stared at me, their hot eyes as puzzled as no doubt my own were; but they made no move toward me.
The hairy being stood up and came forward to touch me lightly on the chest. Then he shook my right hand up and down again. The dogwolves crept on their bellies to our shadows, and one of them, a giant of a fellow, touched my foot with his wet nose, whining a little.
If there has ever been a more astonished person than I was at that second, he must have fainted away with his wonder. I know I grew quite giddy. Now, I said to myself, if Halfspoor were to amble up to me and ask for the loan of my knife, I think he would get it without a question or a raised eyebrow!
The big carnivores lay panting beside us, and the dark rough-coated manlike creature rubbed his chin and stared at me from those deepset eyes; which I could make out now, as they were glittering in a stray beam of sunlight that fell across his strange face.
He said something to me. It was not an animal's noise, but a reasonable imitation of human speech, except that none of the words were familiar.
At once I remembered the young hunter who had come to our glen several years before, from a country far to the north. His language, while much the same as ours, had words in it which we had never heard; and the elders of the tribe said that probably other folk, living in other isolated places, must have developed words of their own too.
This being, of course, seemed to me at first no more a man than were the dogwolves at his feet. He had the same general form, yes, and perhaps even the exact conformation of features under that mat of hair; but what human by any stretch of the imagination could ever grow such a pelt?
Nonetheless, his voice was pleasing enough to the ear, and his speech seemed separated into distinct words, though as I have said, none of them were familiar to me.
I said, "Friend what-is-it, you undoubtedly know what you're talking about, but I do not. I would give a new set of hunting arrows to be able to understand you."