de
her shoot him to the heart, since without his word rendered back to him
he could not live.

Then his wife took both his hands and kissed them tenderly, and with
loud weeping quickly set him free of his promise. "As well," said she,
"ask the hunter to go bound to the lion's den as the white doe to come
tame into your keeping; though she loved you with all her heart, you
could not look at her and not be her enemy." She gazed on him with full
affection, and sighed deeply. "Lie down for a little," she said, "and
rest; it is not till midnight that she comes. When she comes I will wake
you."

She took his head in her hands and set it upon her knee, making him lie
down. "If she will come and stand tame to my hand," he said again, "then
I will do her no harm."

After a while he fell asleep; and, dreaming of the white doe, started
awake to find it was already midnight, and the white doe standing there
before him. But as soon as his eyes lighted on her they kindled with
such fierce ardour that she trembled and sprang away out of the door and
across the stream. "Ah, ah, white doe, white doe!" cried the wind in the
feathers of the shaft that flew after her.

Just at her leaping of the stream the arrow touched her; and all her
body seemed to become a mist that dissolved and floated away, broken
into thin fragments over the fast-flowing stream.

By the hunter's side his wife lay dead, with an arrow struck into her
heart. The door of the house was shut; it seemed to be only an evil
dream from which he had suddenly awakened. But the arrow gave real
substance to his hand: when he drew it out a few true drops of blood
flowed after. Suddenly the hunter knew all he had done. "Oh, white doe,
white doe!" he cried, and fell down with his face to hers.

At the first light of dawn he covered her with dried ferns, that the
children might not see how she lay there dead. "Run out," he cried to
them, "run out and play! Play as the white doe used to do!" And the
children ran out and leapt this way and that across the stream, crying,
"She was like this, and she did this, and this was the way she went!"

So while they played along the banks of the stream, the hunter took up
his beautiful dead wife and buried her. And to the children he said,
"Your mother has gone away; when the white doe comes she will return
also."

"She was like this," they cried, laughing and playing, "and she did
this, and this was the way she went!" And all the time