“They must not come yet. They’ll be in the way!” cried Bawr angrily, waving them back. But they paid no attention––which showed that there was something they feared more even than the iron-fisted Chief.
“There are none of the young women or the old men, who can fight, among them,” said Grôm. “A-ya must have sent them, because the time has come. Let us wait for the young girl, who seems to bring a message.” 285
Breathless, and clutching at her bosom with one hand, the girl fell at Bawr’s feet.
“A-ya says, ‘Come quick!’” she gasped. “They are too many. They run over the fires and trample us.”
Grôm sprang forward with a cry, then stopped and looked at his Chief.
“Go, you,” said Bawr, “and bring them to us. I will stay here and look to the rafts.”
Taking a half-score of the strongest warriors with him, Grôm raced up the steep, torn with anxiety for the fate of A-ya and the children.
It was now about three-quarters tide, and the flood rising strongly. By way of precaution some of the rafts had been kept afloat, let down with ropes of vine to follow the last ebb, and guided carefully back on the returning flood. But most of them were lying where they had been built, or left by the preceding tide, along high-water mark, as hopelessly stranded, for the next two hours, as a birch log after a freshet. As the old women with children arrived, Bawr rushed them down the wet beach to the rafts which were afloat, appointing to each clumsy raft four men, with long, rough flattened poles, to manage it. For the moment, all these men had to do was hold their charges in place that they might not be swept away by the incoming tide.
When Grôm and his eager handful, passing a stream of trembling fugitives on the way, reached the level 286 ground before the Caves, the sight that greeted them was tremendous and appalling. It looked as if some great country to the southward had gathered together all its beasts and then vomited them forth in one vast torrent, confused and irresistible, to the north. It was a wholesale migration, on such a scale as the modern world has never even dreamed of, but suggested in a feeble way by the torrential drift of the bison across the North American plains half a century ago, or the sudden, inexplicable marches of the lemming myriads out of the Scandinavian barrens that give them birth.
The shrill cries of the women, fighting like she-wolves in defense of the children and the home-caves, the hoarse shouts of the old men, weak but indomitable, were mingled with an indescribable medley of noises––gruntings, bellowings, howlings, roarings, bleatings and brayings––from the dreadful mob of beasts which besieged the open space behind the fires. Some of the beasts were maddened with their terror, some were in a fighting rage, some only wanted to escape the throng behind them. But all seemed bent upon passing the fires and getting into the Caves, as if they thought there to find refuge from the unknown fear.