It is the day before the auction, and Mona is gathering up the stock and bringing them down to the houses—the beasts she had put out on the grass, the “dry” cows that are stretched on their bellies chewing the cud, the sheep that are bleating, and the early lambs that are baa-ing.
She is going up the mountain to fetch the young bull to which she has taken a bowl of wheat twice a week throughout the winter. A new wave of hope has come to her, a golden radiance is shining in the future, and she is singing to herself as she climbs through the heather.
Suddenly, when she reaches the top of the hill, by the tower called “Corrin’s Folly,” she hears fierce animals snorting, and at the next moment sees that three bulls are fighting. One of them is her own young bull, small and lithe, the two others are old and large and black and have iron rings in their nostrils. She remembers the old ones. They belong to John Corlett, and must have leapt over the boundary to get at the young one, and are now goring it fearfully.
The fight is frightful. The young bull is bleeding horribly and trying to escape. It leaps over the wall of the little cemetery around the tower and makes for the land on the other side of it which goes down by a steep descent to precipitous cliffs, with the broad sea lying below at a terrible depth. But the old bulls, making hoarse noises from their nostrils, are following it up on either side and intercepting it. As often as the hunted animal runs to the right they gore it back to the left, and when it flies to the left they gore it back to the right.
At length the young bull stands for a moment, with its wild eyes flashing fire and its face towards the cliffs. And then, with a loud snort as of despair and defiance, it bounds forward, gallops straight ahead, and leaps clear over the cliff-head into the sea. The old bulls look after it for a moment with heaving nostrils and dilated eyes, and then begin to graze as if nothing had happened.
Mona has stood helpless and trembling while the fight has lasted, and when it is over and she comes to herself she finds Oskar standing behind her. He has been working on the roof of the tower, to remove the electric wires which have been attached to it, and from there he has seen everything.
“It was horrible, wasn’t it?”
“Horrible!”
“So cruel and cowardly.”
“Yes,” he says, from between his clenched teeth, “and so damnably human.”