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As the drowning monsters battled to get their front legs up upon the raft, the edges gave way continually beneath them, plunging them again and again beneath the surface, while A-ya stabbed at them vengefully with her spear, and Loob shot arrows into them till Grôm stopped him, saying that the arrows were too precious to waste.
The smell of him being extremely offensive to all this cleanly tribe, and especially to A-ya and Grôm, who were more fastidious than their fellows, A-ya had taken advantage of her office as priestess of the Shining One to establish a little fire within the precincts of her own dwelling, and by the judicious use of aromatic barks upon the blaze she was able to scent the place to her taste.
The trail was as clear as daylight to him. Suddenly he heard voices, several of them, guttural and squealing, and stopped again as if turned to stone. Then another voice, at which he started in amazement. It was Mawg's, speaking quietly and confidentially. Mawg, then, had gone over to the Bow-legs! Grôm's forehead wrinkled. A-ya had been right. He ought to have killed the traitor.
So it came that before the sun marked noon the whole tribe was on the march, trailing forth from the neck of the amphitheater at the heels of Grôm and A-ya, and picking their way over the bones of their slain enemies which the vultures and the jackals had already polished white.
But A-ya, who sensed through sympathy her lord's disquietude, and the little scout Loob, who was always, on principle, ill at ease in any spot where there was no tree to climb, were as eager as their chief to push ahead; and the others would never have dared, in any case, to question Grôm's decision.
He felt, as he looked at them and poised them, that in some vital way they belonged to this fascinating implement which A-ya had invented for him. Selecting one of the shafts, he slowly applied the bigger end of it to the bow-string, and stood for a long time pondering it, drawing it a little way and easing it back without releasing it.
Mawg swam the creek, thrust his way through the grass-stems, darted back to snatch up his club, shook it at Grôm, and, yelling an obscene taunt, raced off to seek himself another retreat before nightfall. Neither Grôm nor A-ya had any heed to spare him at that moment. The monster had just torn down a limb so huge that the main trunk was almost split in half by its loss.
"Why not?" demanded Grôm, his eyes still fixed upon the monsters. "Oh! The bees! The terrible bees!" whispered A-ya. "Where can we go?" Grôm turned his head and scanned the belt of woodland, his ears now suddenly comprehending a deep, humming sound which he had hitherto referred solely to the winged foragers in the grass-tops.
There was a chorus of triumphant shouts from the old men and women; and A-ya started forward with the intention of dragging her prize from the fire. But a look of apprehension and warning in the keen little eyes of Ook-ootsk, who had by this time hobbled to her side, checked her. In a flash the meaning of it came to her.
The adoration which soon grew up in his heart for A-ya's beauty, but which his awe of her did not suffer him even to realize to himself, was turned upon the babe, and speedily took the form of a passionate and dog-like devotion. A-ya, with her mother instinct, was quick to understand this, and also to realize the possible value to her child of such a devotion, in some future emergency.
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