I had calculated the drop well. It was too much for his bulk. He loomed above me, raging. I put an arrow in his cheek, and he bit down hard and spat out the head and part of the shaft. I drew a good bead on his eye but he turned much more quickly than I had anticipated and the missile whined away in the sky. He headed back for the climbing stones. I looked about me. There was a broken inclosure nearby in one wall of which was an entrance like a cave mouth, perhaps seven feet high by two broad: it seemed as good a place as any to dodge into, and I did. There I awaited his coming, controlling my breathing as best I could in order that my next shots would not be so shamefully wasted.

Then I heard the dogwolf pack much closer. They yapped and yowled, and mingled with their excited noise was the petulant grunt of Halfspoor. Still I waited, but he did not come. Then I knew by the sounds that the dogwolves had surrounded him. Here was an odd happening! Certainly no dogwolf would attack a knifetooth bear, even though he ran with five score other canines. Only a very silly human hunter would pit himself against old Halfspoor.

But, by my love for Lora, they were shepherding him across the ruins! I caught a glimpse of the old devil backing reluctantly up a mound, and then as I gaped he turned and shambled off down a black ravine, complaining and waving his forepaws angrily. In a great circle they followed him, nipping at his heels, leaping out of range, and keeping up an incessant clamor that sounded like boys teasing a captured cave cat kitten.

I counted the arrows in my quiver. There were six now. Ill luck rode my shoulders that day. Halfspoor should be bleeding to death with eight shafts in his chest and head; instead he had four or five inconsiderable wounds, one of which I had not even given him.

I spat on the ground, wishing I had a drink of water. Ahmusk, mighty stalker of knifetooth bears! I laughed without mirth. Ahmusk, desperate invader of the land of The Nameless. There, now, was a title for a brave man; but I had come here in the grip of hunting-fever, and so little credit attached to me for the deed. I was in a mood to revile myself aloud. I smote my bare thigh and swore heartily. What should I do now about Halfspoor? There was no profit in advertising my presence to the dogwolf pack. They had been known to pull down men if they were hungry.

I put my hands to my ears and rubbed them roughly, for of a sudden they were tingling and prickling. It was as though I had heard a high unpleasant sound; but except for the distant uproar of Halfspoor and his annoyers, there was nothing. The country was bewitched, that was it. There was a pause, and then my eardrums thrilled briefly again to something I could not locate or analyze.

I glanced behind me at the inclosure. Roofless, I had the feeling that it must once have been roofed; there were low piles of rock trash all about, as there would have been had the roof—fallen now—been somehow impossibly made of stone. What prodigies of strength and skill had wrought these incredible walls? I shook my head, and turned back to the entrance.

There was something approaching slowly over the ruined structures to my right. I looked at it with widening eyes. It was about a hundred paces off. For one sickening moment I believed it to be some horrid kind of ogre, made of muck or rotted flesh or some such grisly matter; it seemed slimy and dead....

Then the sun struck it, and I decided that it was simply covered with long trailing dark hair, which glistened wetly in the rays of the dying sun.

It came on, and my knees smote together while my tongue stuck to the roof of my sudden-dried mouth.

In form it was like a man. Indeed, had a man been smeared with black mud, and then been given a coat of heavy hair, oily or permanently damp hair, he might well have resembled this creature. I judged it to be about six feet or a little over, my own height; and so later it proved to be. It moved oddly, with a sort of halting gait, weaving its arms to keep its balance on the jagged rocks. I could see two deep blackish pits in its head where its eyes would be, and matted straggly hair fell lifelessly from its crown. It was naked, like an animal.

I thought of my mother's old songs of the ogre-breed, which can take all manner of shapes, but often emulate mankind, building their frames magically from dead beasts or from the masses of decomposing vegetable matter in the forests. Maybe my first idea had been right, and this was an ogre of mire and pelts, all wickedness.

At any rate, it was coming at me, if rather slowly; and so I put an arrow to the string, being minded to die bravely as becomes a hunter of the glen-folk.

Seeing me raise the bow, it waved at me in protest, and with so human a gesture that I could not shoot it, but only held my weapon ready. It then raised one hand to its face, with something bright in its fingers (it had fingers, I could see, like a man's), and my ears tingled again to the unheard sound or vibration which had bothered me previously.

From the ruins behind it rose the noise of dogwolves barking. It nodded, like a man who would say to himself, That is good. Then it came on with its slow, almost apologetic pace. I lowered my bow. Somehow I felt that it meant me no injury.

When it was no more than half-a-dozen feet off, it halted; and we stared at each other curiously.

It was a hairy brute, to be sure, but evidently no ogre. Its thatch glistened darkly, and seemed of the consistency of a cave cat's mane, but without curls; lank, long, and thick. In the places where this mantle did not grow, as on the cheeks and forehead and on the rounded portions of the limbs, there was a short dusky shag, a nap like that on a knifetooth bear's muzzle. The effect was startling, but on close inspection not really ugly, and wholly without the impression of terror which my first sight of it had brought. It appeared to be watching me steadily, though its eyes were entirely hidden in their sunken shadowed wells. Finally it put up its right hand to the level of its waist and held it there. I could not see the significance of the gesture. After a moment it thrust the open hand out to me in several short jabs. The motion was entirely without menace. I could make nothing of it.

It clasped its hands together and shook them. Then it stuck the right one toward me again. I realized that it wished to touch my own hand!

I shifted my bow to my left hand—so sure had I grown in these few brief seconds that it meant no harm—and touched its hairy fingertips. Instantly my hand was enfolded in a firm hearty grip, and moved rapidly up and down. I cannot explain how or why the emotion swept over me, but immediately I felt a warm friendship for this shaggy being, such a feeling as I had never held before for anything save my fellow men and women of the valleys.

And there was something else. The gesture felt ... felt natural, and proper, and almost familiar, as though I had done it many times before!

Mystified, I drew back my hand as he released it; and once more we stood staring at each other without sound.

A movement at last caught my eye, and staring over his shoulder I saw two great dogwolves breast a wall and come loping toward us. With a warning cry I threw up my bow. In the time it took me to change hands on it, he had peered back; then he gave a cry, remarkably manlike in tone, and waved urgently at my face. Scowling, I dodged back to get a shot at the foremost brute. At once the hairy thing knelt, as if pleading, and the pair of dogwolves, coming up, fawned on him with lolling scarlet tongues.

My jaw dropped and I gasped, dumbfounded.

The fierce beasts were his friends!

I slung my bow over my shoulder, but took the precaution of grasping my bone hatchet. The dogwolves stared at me, their hot eyes as puzzled as no doubt my own were; but they made no move toward me.

The hairy being stood up and came forward to touch me lightly on the chest. Then he shook my right hand up and down again. The dogwolves crept on their bellies to our shadows, and one of them, a giant of a fellow, touched my foot with his wet nose, whining a little.

If there has ever been a more astonished person than I was at that second, he must have fainted away with his wonder. I know I grew quite giddy. Now, I said to myself, if Halfspoor were to amble up to me and ask for the loan of my knife, I think he would get it without a question or a raised eyebrow!

The big carnivores lay panting beside us, and the dark rough-coated manlike creature rubbed his chin and stared at me from those deepset eyes; which I could make out now, as they were glittering in a stray beam of sunlight that fell across his strange face.

He said something to me. It was not an animal's noise, but a reasonable imitation of human speech, except that none of the words were familiar.

At once I remembered the young hunter who had come to our glen several years before, from a country far to the north. His language, while much the same as ours, had words in it which we had never heard; and the elders of the tribe said that probably other folk, living in other isolated places, must have developed words of their own too.

This being, of course, seemed to me at first no more a man than were the dogwolves at his feet. He had the same general form, yes, and perhaps even the exact conformation of features under that mat of hair; but what human by any stretch of the imagination could ever grow such a pelt?

Nonetheless, his voice was pleasing enough to the ear, and his speech seemed separated into distinct words, though as I have said, none of them were familiar to me.

I said, "Friend what-is-it, you undoubtedly know what you're talking about, but I do not. I would give a new set of hunting arrows to be able to understand you."

He uttered more words, pointing off to the west where the tall raw cliffs were even now shutting off the lower half of the sun.

"Yes," I said, "evening comes on, and you're afraid I'll wander over into the country of The Nameless. Is that it? Never you fear, my friend, I'll not go a step farther in that direction."

But he took my hand, hesitantly and as though afraid that I might be offended; and he tried to lead me westward.

I hung back, and the dogwolves growled a little, but desisted when he spoke to them. Then he signed to me, as plainly as one could imagine, that there was food where he was taking me; and so because of my grumbling belly I suffered him to lead me off among the ruins of this fabulous place.

As we walked I thought of Lora, and her distress in the morning when she would find me still away; but not for anything would I tread the paths of the Fearful Forest at night. I must find a sleeping place nearby.

We passed the flat-faced precipice with the five lines of square openings, where Halfspoor's brown lady had been sitting. I pointed up and said, "Knifetooth bear!" He cocked his head at me. I hunched my shoulders, put two fingers athwart my lips for fangs, roared like a bear and said, "Knifetooth!" again.

The hairy one stopped, opened his mouth—he had teeth as even and white as my own—and out of his throat came the exact duplicate of old Halfspoor's battle cry. The dogwolves leaped and barked excitedly. I nodded agreement and said, "Bear!"

He said something guttural that sounded like oorsa. I made him repeat it several times. It occurred to me that ursus is another of our names for old knifetooth; and my wonder grew apace.

Pointing to myself, I then exclaimed, "Ahmusk!"

He said my name with no difficulty, and then seemed rather confused; for he tapped his own black chest and said, "Ahmusk?"

I tried again. I touched the bigger of the two canines and said, "Dogwolf."

He mastered that more or less, and in return gave me his name for the brute, which was poort or spoort, I could not tell which. His sibilants were tongued so lightly that they were difficult to hear.

I indicated myself and said, "Man." I prodded him and repeated it. Then I realized consciously for the first time that I was now regarding him as a species of human. He had taken me for kin before, as his former use of my name as a generic term plainly proved.

"Ahmusk," said I once more, beating my bosom.

"Ahmusk," said he, pointing; and then, laying a shining-haired paw on his own breast, "Dy-lee!"

"Dy-lee," I said, charming him no end, for he capered grotesquely and nodded his head till the lank thatch flew.

Well, now we were acquainted. My pleasure at finding this strange brute-man was out of all proportion to its apparent importance. I suppose it was reaction to my hours-long suspicion that I had played the complete fool in coming into this country, in following the terrible Halfspoor, in ignoring the age-old forbiddance against crossing into the land of The Nameless.... Now all seemed to have come out well. Halfspoor, who had been proving more than a match for me, had been harried off, evidently on orders from this Dy-lee creature, by a pack of dogwolves. The Nameless were nowhere in evidence. Food and possibly a tree for the night were in the offing. And I had made a wonderful discovery, a brain-shaking find; for if I was right, I had chanced upon a new branch of the family of men.

Through the ruins we went, the dogwolves at our heels; and we were as delighted with one another as two boys who have been given their father's old bone hatchet to play with.

The silver dusk came up from the earth, spawned from the shadows of the many ruinous walls and ramparts; and far ahead I saw a scarlet eye wink out at us from the darkening cliff. I clutched Dy-lee's shaggy arm involuntarily, and hissed at him, as though he understood the words, "The Nameless!"

He understood, at any rate, that I was frightened; for he patted me awkwardly on the back two or three times, and said something in his language meant, by the tone, to be reassuring.

A hunter could not hang back where a brute-man like this went on. He obviously knew what the scarlet eye was, and seemed utterly without fear. And so after a time we had come near enough to it for me to see that it was no ghastly orb of a Nameless ogre, but the mouth of a cave, fairly high up the raw cliff, shining with the reflection of a fire deep within it.

Evidently Dy-lee meant to go into the cave, for soon we had struck a well-worn path and were traveling upward. I imagined that there were friends of his there, with whom he would eat before seeking his tree for the night. Overcoming my dislike of caves with a wrenching effort, I followed him up the path and stood on the threshold of the grotto, having a last look about me. From this vantage point I could see the glimmering of fires from several other great holes which had been hidden from the plain.

Then I went into the cave of Dy-lee the hairy man.

The fire, leaping merrily within a ring of stones, heated the long tunnel-like cavern for many paces on all sides; and about it, some cooking meat, some engaged in low-voiced conversation, and some making or repairing noose-traps, snares for rabbits and birds such as our children often play with, were a score or so of the long-maned people. My last doubt as to their humanity vanished at sight of the flames, for no animal can control fire. Except for their pelts, these folks might have been my own.

Some of them sprang to their feet as we entered, waving their arms and shouting. Dy-lee quieted them with a crisp word, and putting his hand on my shoulder he made a speech at which they all came crowding around, each one wanting to shake my hand up and down. It was all wonderfully friendly and heart-warming. Instinctively I loved these people, and pitied them a little, too, for that they must live so close to the terrible country of The Nameless.

At thought of those malignant beings, I remembered Laq the guardian, whose arrow (I felt sure) had goaded the bear Halfspoor into attacking me; but at once I put the bitter thought from me, and shaking the hand of one dark fellow while grinning amiably into the almost featureless face of another, I moved to the fire and was given a haunch of hare, all smoking and hot from the spits above the flames. After I had wolfed this, while the whole company stared at me and chattered among themselves. Dy-lee handed me some meat off the brisket of a doe. I wondered how they managed to catch deer, for the only traps in evidence were the small rabbit-snares, while none of them carried lances or bows or even metal knives, but had some crude flint daggers with which they made shift to cut up their meat. Then my eye fell on several of the tame poorts, or dogwolves, lounging insolently about among the hairy folk; and I recalled their pack chivvying Halfspoor over the ruins. There was the answer! Incredible though it was, these men must have trained their four-footed companions to pull down deer—even stag and bison for all I knew—for the masters' larder.