By the time I had crossed Sunset Fields and come to the Gray Brook, I had forgotten Laq and pushed Lora to the back of my mind. The day was perfect. Every bird in the world was making merry on his twig, every small animal had left his burrow to romp drunkenly through the underbrush, intoxicated with the bright keen air of morning. I passed a doe with her fawn, trotting happily toward the water; and I did not bring her down, though she would have been easy prey and good eating, for we shared a joy that made us sib to one another.
Still, for me the pleasure of autumn was now only a background against which my thoughts of Halfspoor the bear marched in orderly fashion while I reviewed them one by one. I recalled his slayings of men, his occasional and very skillful stalking of the night watchers in their trees at either end of our valley. I remembered how on this morning he would be found asleep in his old lair under the two fallen petrified tree ferns downstream near the Blue Brook, while on that morning he would be gnawing the bones of bison or cave cat or perhaps even of jackal-rat (for he was a dirty feeder, was Halfspoor), far up the Crimson. I visualized his footprint, unique among knifetooth bears, measuring as long as my arm from wrist to shoulder, and with three outer toes gone from the right hind pug. As I waded through the Gray Brook's chilled waters I could almost imagine that I saw the maimed sign of his pad on the silver strand before me. "How well I know that track!" I exclaimed to myself, with an egotistic pride in my craft; and then I came out of the waters to find that, far from so clearly imagining it in all its enormous crippled particulars, I had actually been looking at the veritable track of Halfspoor himself. I was exultant and humiliated at the same time.
Halting above it, I tested my bow once more, and counted the fourteen bone-pointed arrows in their quiver that I had made from the paw and forearm pelt of another knifetooth bear, my lucky quiver with the claws still hanging from its tip. The metal knife was in its sheath at my hip, the bone hatchet dangled from a sling handy to my left hand. I took a deep breath and began to follow the great mutilated prints overland toward the second of the three streams.
Soon I had crossed the Blue and was approaching the Crimson Brook. Halfspoor was perhaps two hours ahead of me. Where he had trodden in sand, the water had filled his track, and where he had ambled heavily across grassy spaces, the blades had sprung nearly to uprightness again. He was traveling slowly, inspecting logs and coverts, probably talking to himself in the gruff complaining whine of his breed. Here and there he had lingered a moment or two, and in these places I could often catch a whiff of his rank ursine odor.
At first I had no desire to catch up with Halfspoor. Almost would I rather have come face to face with one of The Nameless! No hunter is a match for a full-grown knifetooth bear, standing as he does more than twice as tall as a man, with an unbelievable bulk that must outweigh twenty-five humans, every ounce of which is full of fight and choler and wickedness. His twin saber-tusks jut down in great deadly arcs, yellow and sharp and long as a hunting arrow. His head is larger than that of any animal, even than that of the cave cat who lives to the north and can be heard yowling a full day's journey away. When a knifetooth bear opens his maw it is like staring into a huge fang-rimmed scarlet well. His paws are swift gargantuan weapons that can enfold and crush the largest stag. Oh, a terrible beast is old knifetooth! And Halfspoor was the biggest, the angriest, the wisest and most hateful of his tribe.
I tracked him but did not hurry overmuch; when I had decided where he would spend the night, I would return to the glen, and persuade a dozen of our hunters to accompany me to find him. If he lay over a kill, stupid and drowsy with eating, we would attack him. Some of us might die, but Halfspoor also would die ... if we were lucky. By right of my trailing I would then lay claim to his pelt, and from it make a mating fur for Lora. And the watchers would feel happier as they sat the nights through in their trees at the ends of the valley, because Halfspoor would never trouble them again.
On this I thought as I crossed the Crimson Brook, and saw the first line of trees rising from gray tangled thickets that marked the beginning of the Fearful Forest. Halfspoor's pugmarks went straight toward them. And it was then that I began to form my daring plan. The bear was obviously going to go to ground somewhere in the woodland, and no hunter would follow me into that dreadful place after sundown.
Why not follow him and kill him myself?
Of all the folk, I alone had killed a knifetooth bear. Truly he had been but partially grown, and I had not deliberately stalked him to kill; no, I had blundered on him and it had been slay or be slain. But in that fight I had learnt much of a knifetooth's tactics, blind spots and weaknesses. His arm was now my quiver, his hide my sleeping rug. Halfspoor was only twice his size, at most, and surely the best hunter of the glen was a match for him? I who could loose four arrows and notch a fifth before the first struck its mark a hundred paces off—why should old tribal fears and the experiences of lesser men keep me from trying my hand at conquering this maimed brute?