e left in the direction they must needs take, they saw
suddenly first one bear and then two coming up the grass slope to the
right and going across the amphitheatre towards the caves. Andoo was
first; he dropped a little on his fore-foot and his mien was despondent,
and the she-bear came shuffling behind.

Eudena and Ugh-lomi stepped back from the cliff until they could just
see the bears over the verge. Then Ugh-lomi stopped. Eudena pulled his
arm, but he turned with a forbidding gesture, and her hand dropped.
Ugh-lomi stood watching the bears, with his axe in his hand, until they
had vanished into the cave. He growled softly, and shook the axe at the
she-bear's receding quarters. Then to Eudena's terror, instead of
creeping off with her, he lay flat down and crawled forward into such a
position that he could just see the cave. It was bears--and he did it
as calmly as if it had been rabbits he was watching!

He lay still, like a barked log, sun-dappled, in the shadow of the
trees. He was thinking. And Eudena had learnt, even when a little girl,
that when Ugh-lomi became still like that, jaw-bone on fist, novel
things presently began to happen.

It was an hour before the thinking was over; it was noon when the two
little savages had found their way to the cliff brow that overhung the
bears' cave. And all the long afternoon they fought desperately with a
great boulder of chalk; trundling it, with nothing but their unaided
sturdy muscles, from the gully where it had hung like a loose tooth,
towards the cliff top. It was full two yards about, it stood as high as
Eudena's waist, it was obtuse-angled and toothed with flints. And when
the sun set it was poised, three inches from the edge, above the cave of
the great cave bear.

In the cave conversation languished during that afternoon. The she-bear
snoozed sulkily in her corner--for she was fond of pig and monkey--and
Andoo was busy licking the side of his paw and smearing his face to cool
the smart and inflammation of his wounds. Afterwards he went and sat
just within the mouth of the cave, blinking out at the afternoon sun
with his uninjured eye, and thinking.

"I never was so startled in my life," he said at last. "They are the
most extraordinary beasts. Attacking _me_!"

"I don't like them," said the she-bear, out of the darkness behind.

"A feebler sort of beast I _never_ saw. I can't think what the world is
coming to. Scraggy, weedy legs.... Wonder how they keep