They could not have said how they first came to hear of the Forest: they had always talked of it. To Hector, at least, it was so vivid that he seemed to have actually struggled through its immense depths, swung in its hanging creepers, smelt its sickly-sweet orchids, breathed its hot, damp air—so far real to both alike that they would find themselves saying, “Do you remember?” in speaking of paths that they had never traversed.
Provisionally they had fixed their Forest at the Miocene Period. Or, rather, this is what it came to: the boy ceasing to protest against the winged monsters, the rhinoceros, the long-jawed mastodon which fascinated the girl’s imagination; though there was one impassioned scene when he flamed out over his clear remembrance of a sabre-toothed tiger, putting all those others—stupid, hulking brutes!—out of court by many thousands of years.
“They couldn’t have been there, couldn’t—not with us and with ‘It’—I saw it, I tell you—I tell you I saw it!” His pale face flamed, his eyes were as bright as steel. “The mastodon! That’s nothing—nothing! But the sabre-toothed tiger—I tell you I saw it. What are you grinning at now?—in our Forest—ours, mind you!—I saw it!”
“Oh, indeed, indeed!” Suddenly, because the day was so hot, because they were bored, because she was unwittingly impressed, as always, by her brother’s heat of conviction, Rhoda’s serene temper was gone. “And did you see yourself? and what were you doing there, may I ask—you! Silly infant, don’t you know that there weren’t any men then? Phew! Everyone knows that—everyone. You and your old tiger!”
There was mockery in her laugh as she took him by the lapels of his coat; shook him.
Then, next moment when he turned aside, sullen and pale, his brows in a pent-house above his eyes, she was filled with contrition. The rotten, thundery day had set her all on edge; it was a shame to tease him like this; and, after all, how often had she herself remembered back? Though there was a difference, and she knew it, a sense of fantasy, pretending; while Hector was as jealous of every detail of their Forest as a long-banished exile over every cherished memory of his own land.
Though, of course, there were no men contemporary with that wretched tiger: he knew that; he must know.
Lolling under their one tree, in the steamy, early afternoon, she coaxed him back to the subject, and was beaten upon it, as the half-hearted always are.
He was so amazingly clear about the whole thing.... Why, it might have happened yesterday!
He had been up in the trees, slinking along—not the hunting man, but the hunted—watchful, furtive; a picker-up of what other beasts had slain and taken their fill of: more watchful than usual because he had already come across a carcass left by the long-toothed terror, all the blood sucked out of it. Swinging from bough to bough by his hands—which, even when he stood upright, as upright as possible, dangled far below his knees—he had actually seen it; seen its gleaming tusks, its shining eyes; seen it, and fled, wild with terror.