Recovering at length from his amazement, Bawr remarked:
“They seem to have two tails, those new beasts––a little tail behind, in the usual place, and a very big tail in front, which they use as a hand. They are very many, and very terrible. Do you think it is they who are driving all these other beasts upon us to overwhelm us?”
Grôm thought long before replying.
“No,” said he, “they are not flesh-eaters. See! They do not heed the other beasts. They eat trees. And they, too, seem restless. I think they are themselves driven. But what dreadful beings must be they who can drive them!”
“If they are driven over us,” muttered Bawr, “they will grind us and our fires into the dust.”
“It must be men,” mused Grôm aloud, “men far mightier than ourselves and so countless that the hordes of the Tree Men would seem a handful in comparison. Only men, or gods, and in swarms like locusts, could so drive all these mighty beasts before them as a child drives rabbits.”
“Before they come,” said Bawr, dropping his great craggy chin upon his breast, “the People of the Caves will be trodden out. Whither can we escape from such foes? We will build great fires before the caves, and we will go down fighting, as befits men.”
He lifted his maned and massive head, and shook 282 his great spear defiantly at the unknown doom that was coming up from the south. But Grôm’s eyes were sunken deep under his brows in brooding thought.
“There is one way, perhaps,” he said at length. “We have learned to journey on the water. We must build us rafts, many rafts, to carry all the tribe. And when we can no longer hold our fires and our caves we will push out upon the water, and perhaps make our way to that blue shore yonder, where they cannot follow us.”
“The waves, and the monsters of the waves, will swallow us up,” suggested Bawr.