of death.

The she-bear stopped dead. Even now, that the great and wonderful Andoo
was killed was beyond her believing. Then she heard far overhead a
sound, a queer sound, a little like the shout of a hyaena but fuller and
lower in pitch. She looked up, her little dawn-blinded eyes seeing
little, her nostrils quivering. And there, on the cliff edge, far above
her against the bright pink of dawn, were two little shaggy round dark
things, the heads of Eudena and Ugh-lomi, as they shouted derision at
her. But though she could not see them very distinctly she could hear,
and dimly she began to apprehend. A novel feeling as of imminent strange
evils came into her heart.

She began to examine the smashed fragments of chalk that lay about
Andoo. For a space she stood still, looking about her and making a low
continuous sound that was almost a moan. Then she went back
incredulously to Andoo to make one last effort to rouse him.

III--THE FIRST HORSEMAN

In the days before Ugh-lomi there was little trouble between the horses
and men. They lived apart--the men in the river swamps and thickets, the
horses on the wide grassy uplands between the chestnuts and the pines.
Sometimes a pony would come straying into the clogging marshes to make a
flint-hacked meal, and sometimes the tribe would find one, the kill of a
lion, and drive off the jackals, and feast heartily while the sun was
high. These horses of the old time were clumsy at the fetlock and
dun-coloured, with a rough tail and big head. They came every
spring-time north-westward into the country, after the swallows and
before the hippopotami, as the grass on the wide downland stretches
grew long. They came only in small bodies thus far, each herd, a
stallion and two or three mares and a foal or so, having its own stretch
of country, and they went again when the chestnut-trees were yellow and
the wolves came down the Wealden mountains.

It was their custom to graze right out in the open, going into cover
only in the heat of the day. They avoided the long stretches of thorn
and beechwood, preferring an isolated group of trees void of ambuscade,
so that it was hard to come upon them. They were never fighters; their
heels and teeth were for one another, but in the clear country, once
they were started, no living thing came near them, though perhaps the
elephant might have done so had he felt the need. And in those days man
seemed a harmless thing enough. No whisper of prophe