omewhere
unseen in the shades. The eighth overhaul gave up some rope, in which
he nearly got himself entangled, and which he finally carried away,
bitten and frayed past use. The ninth search rewarded him with tea,
which he scattered, and bacon, which he buried.

What he could not drag out, he scattered. What he failed to remove, he
defiled. And, at last, when he had made of the place, not an orderly
_cache_, but a third-rate _debacle_, he sauntered, always slouching,
always grossly untidy, hump-backed, stooping, low-headed, and
droop-tailed, shabbily unrespectable, out into the night, and the
darkness of the night, under the trees.

By the time day dawned he was as if he never had been--a memory, no
more. Heaven knows where he was!

Gulo appeared quite suddenly and very early, for him, next afternoon,
beside some tangled brush on the edge of a clearing. He was sitting
up, almost bolt-upright, and he was shading his eyes with his forepaws.
A man could not have done more. And, in fact, he did not look like an
animal at all, but like some diabolically uncouth dwarf of the woods.

A squirrel was telling him, from a branch near by, just what everybody
thought of his disgraceful appearance; and two willow-grouse were
clucking at him from some hazel-tops; whilst a raven, black as coal
against the white of the woods, jabbed in gruff and very rude remarks
from time to time.

But Gulo was taking no notice of them. He was used to attentions of
that kind; it was a little compliment--of hate--they all paid him. He
was looking persistently down the ranked, narrowing perspective of the
buttressed forest glade to where it faded in the blue-gray mist,
southward, as if he expected something to come from there. Something
was coming from there now; and there had been a faint, uneasy sort of
whisper in that direction for some time. Now it was unmistakable.

A cow-elk, first of the wary ones to move on alarm, came trotting by,
her Roman nose held well out; a red-deer hind, galloping lightly like
some gigantic hare, her big ears turned astern; a wolf, head up,
hackles alift, alternately loping and pivoting, to listen and look
back, a wild reindeer, trotting heavily, but far more quickly than he
seemed to be--all these passed, now on one side, now on the other,
often only glimpses between the tree-boles, while the wolverine sat up
and shaded his eyes with his paws. Something was moving those beasts,
those haunters of the fo