were few in the beginning, he
said, and he had first heard of them as being some miles away. But more
came, and ever more; and as they came they pushed farther and farther
into the mountains. What they were doing he did not know, but they kept
for the most part along by the streams, where they dug holes everywhere.
No, they did not live in the holes. They built themselves places to live
in out of trees which they cut down and chopped into lengths and piled
together. Why they did that, when it was so much easier to dig
comfortable holes in the hillside, he did not know; but they did. And
they did not cut down the trees with their teeth like beavers, but took
sticks in their hands and beat them till they fell!

Yes, it was true about the fires they made. They made them every day and
all the time, usually just outside the houses that they built of the
chopped trees. The fires were terrible to look at, but the men did not
seem to be afraid of them. They stood quite close to them, especially in
the evenings, and burned their food in them before they ate it.

We had heard this before, but had not believed it. And it was true,
after all! What was still more wonderful, Cinnamon said that he had gone
down at night, when the men were all asleep in their chopped-tree
houses, and, sniffing round, had found pieces of this burnt food lying
about, and eaten them, and--they were very good! So good were they that,
incredible as it might seem, Cinnamon had gone again and again, night
after night, to look for scraps that had been left lying about.

On the previous night he had gone down as usual after the men, as he
supposed, were all asleep, but he was arrested before he got to the
houses themselves by a strong smell of the burnt food somewhere close by
him. The men, he explained, had cut down the trees nearest to the stream
to build their houses with, so that between the edge of the forest and
the water there was an open space dotted with the stumps of the trees
that had been felled, which stuck up as high as a bear's shoulder from
the ground. It was just at the edge of this open space that he smelled
the burnt food, and, sure enough, on one of the nearest stumps there was
a bigger lump of it than any he had ever seen. Naturally, he went
straight up to it.

Just as he got to it he heard a movement between him and the houses,
and, looking round, he saw a man lying flat on the ground in such a way
that he had hitherto been hidden by an