moke filtered through the tree's thick branches
and vanished into space. The men used to go to and from their
dwelling-place, wading in the mountain stream, which ran down the
hill. No-one looked for their tracks under the merry, bubbling
water.

At first they were hunted like wild beasts. The peasants gathered
as if for a chase of bear or wolf. The wood was surrounded by men
with bows and arrows. Men with spears went through it and left no
dark crevice, no bushy thicket unexplored. While the noisy battue
hunted through the wood, the outlaws lay in their dark hole,
listening breathlessly, panting with terror. The fisherman held out
a whole day, but he who had murdered was driven by unbearable fear
out into the open, where he could see his enemy. He was seen and
hunted, but it seemed to him seven times better than to lie still
in helpless inactivity. He fled from his pursuers, slid down
precipices, sprang over streams, climbed up perpendicular mountain
walls. All latent strength and dexterity in him was called forth by
the excitement of danger. His body became elastic like a steel
spring, his foot made no false step, his hand never lost its hold,
eye and ear were twice as sharp as usual. He understood what the
leaves whispered and the rocks warned. When he had climbed up a
precipice, he turned towards his pursuers, sending them gibes in
biting rhyme. When the whistling darts whizzed by him, he caught
them, swift as lightning, and hurled them down on his enemies. As
he forced his way through whipping branches, something within him
sang a song of triumph.

The bald mountain ridge ran through the wood and alone on its
summit stood a lofty fir. The red-brown trunk was bare, but in the
branching top rocked an eagle's nest. The fugitive was now so
audaciously bold that he climbed up there, while his pursuers
looked for him on the wooded slopes. There he sat twisting the
young eaglets' necks, while the hunt passed by far below him. The
male and female eagle, longing for revenge, swooped down on the
ravisher. They fluttered before his face, they struck with their
beaks at his eyes, they beat him with their wings and tore with
their claws bleeding weals in his weather beaten skin. Laughing, he
fought with them. Standing upright in the shaking nest, he cut at
them with his sharp knife and forgot in the pleasure of the play
his danger and his pursuers. When he found time to look for them,
they had gone by to some other part o