n into
his indisputable province, stirred him with a sense of strange new
happenings. He had been after red deer fawn that night, for the cave
bear was a miscellaneous hunter, but this quite turned him from that
enterprise.

"Ya-ha!" yelled the hyaenas behind. "Ya-ha-ha!"

Peering through the starlight, Andoo saw there were now three or four
going to and fro against the grey hillside. "They will hang about me now
all the night ... until I kill," said Andoo. "Filth of the world!" And
mainly to annoy them, he resolved to watch the red flicker in the gorge
until the dawn came to drive the hyaena scum home. And after a time they
vanished, and he heard their voices, like a party of Cockney
beanfeasters, away in the beechwoods. Then they came slinking near
again. Andoo yawned and went on along the cliff, and they followed. Then
he stopped and went back.

It was a splendid night, beset with shining constellations, the same
stars, but not the same constellations we know, for since those days all
the stars have had time to move into new places. Far away across the
open space beyond where the heavy-shouldered, lean-bodied hyaenas
blundered and howled, was a beechwood, and the mountain slopes rose
beyond, a dim mystery, until their snow-capped summits came out white
and cold and clear, touched by the first rays of the yet unseen moon. It
was a vast silence, save when the yell of the hyaenas flung a vanishing
discordance across its peace, or when from down the hills the trumpeting
of the new-come elephants came faintly on the faint breeze. And below
now, the red flicker had dwindled and was steady, and shone a deeper
red, and Ugh-lomi had finished his story and was preparing to sleep, and
Eudena sat and listened to the strange voices of unknown beasts, and
watched the dark eastern sky growing deeply luminous at the advent of
the moon. Down below, the river talked to itself, and things unseen went
to and fro.

After a time the bear went away, but in an hour he was back again. Then,
as if struck by a thought, he turned, and went up the gorge....

The night passed, and Ugh-lomi slept on. The waning moon rose and lit
the gaunt white cliff overhead with a light that was pale and vague. The
gorge remained in a deeper shadow and seemed all the darker. Then by
imperceptible degrees, the day came stealing in the wake of the
moonlight. Eudena's eyes wandered to the cliff brow overhead once, and
then again. Each time the line was sharp