dden savage growl, envious, perhaps, of
its long, springing hindlegs. Something, too--the same something--must
have moved the lynx, and Gulo shifted the faster for the knowledge.

Half-an-hour passed, an hour slid by, and all the time Gulo kicked the
miles behind him, with that dogged persistency that was part of his
character. Nothing had passed him for quite a while, and he was all
alone in the utterly still, silent forest and the snow, pad-pad-padding
along like a moving, squat machine rather than a beast.

At last he stopped, and, spinning round, sat up. A gray-blue haze,
like the color on a wood-pigeon, was creeping over everything, except
in the west, where the sky held a faint, luminous, pinky tinge that
foretold frost. It was very cold, and the snow, which had never quite
left off, was falling now only in single, big, wandering flakes. The
silence was almost terrifying.

Then, as Gulo sat up, from far away, but not quite so far away, his
rounded ears, almost buried in fur, caught faintly--very, very
faintly--a sound that brought him down on all fours, and sent him away
again at a gallop with a strange new light burning in his little,
wide-set eyes. It was the unmistakable sound of a horse
sneezing--once. Gulo did not wait to hear if it sneezed twice. He was
gone in an instant. Man, it seemed, had not been long in answering
that challenge of the _cache_ escapade.

After that there was no such thing as time at all, only an everlasting
succession of iron-hard tree-trunks sliding by, and shadows--they ran
when they saw him, some of them, or gathered to stare with eyes that
glinted--dancing past. The moon came and hung itself up in the
heavens, mocking him with a pitiless, stark glare. (He would have
given his right forepaw for a black night and a blinding snowstorm.)
It almost seemed as if they were all laughing at him, Gulo the dreaded,
the hated hater, because it was his turn at last, who had so freely
dealt in it, to know fear.

Hours passed certainly, hours upon hours, and still, his breath coming
quickly and less easily now with every mile, Gulo stuck to the job of
putting the landscape behind him with that grim pertinacity of his that
was almost fine.

At last the trees stopped abruptly, and he was heading, straighter than
crows fly, across a plain. The plain undulated a little, like a sea, a
dead sea, of spotless white, with nothing alive upon it--only his
hunched, slouching, untidy, squat