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At the very moment when her eyes fell upon him, he dropped flat upon his face, and began worming his way soundlessly through the herbage. Her mouth opened wide to give the alarm. But the cry stopped in her throat, and a smile of bitter triumph spread over her face. If Mawg was hunting Grôm, he was at the same time himself being hunted. And by a dreadful hunter.
The girl laughed, whereupon he shot her a menacing look which so enraged her that she raised her spear as if to transfix him. But there was too much happening below for her attention to remain on Mawg.
Grôm hesitated, wondering how he could get this inert weight up into the tree. The girl did not understand his hesitation. "Kill him!" she hissed, leaning down eagerly from her branch overhead. "No, he's a great warrior, and the tribe needs him," answered Grôm, stooping to shake the prostrate form. Mawg stirred, beginning to recover. Grôm shook him again.
Mawg was sitting on the next branch, a good spear's length distant, and glowering at A-ya's lithe shapeliness with eyes of savage greed. Grôm knit his brows, and significantly passed an arm about the girl's shoulders. Mawg shifted his attention to him. "What do you want of me?" he demanded, in a thick, guttural voice. "I thought you ran as if you did not want the lions to eat you," answered Grôm.
They'll never get here!" he muttered anxiously. "No!" said A-ya, with blank unconcern. "The lions will get them. It's Mawg, and his two cousins." Grôm growled an exclamation of astonishment. The girl's eyes or her intuitions were keener than his. But he saw at a second glance that she was right.
Grôm sat down in sudden despair. If Mawg, who at least was no coward, had fled alone, then surely the girl was dead. Grôm's club and his spears dropped from his nerveless hands. His interest in life sank into a sick indifference, a dull anguish which he did not even try to understand. It was well for him that no prowling beast came by in that moment of his unseeing weakness.
Some days' journey to the westward of the swampy refuge of the Bow-legs, a tall hunter was making his way warily through the forest. His color, his build, and his swift grace of movement proclaimed him of the same race as Mawg and the girl A-ya, acquitting him easily of any kinship with the People of the Trees.
In height and weight he was much like Mawg, but lighter in complexion, somewhat less hairy, and of a frank, sagacious countenance. His eyes were of a blue-gray, calm and piercing, yet with a look in them as of one who broods on mysteries. He was obviously much older than Mawg, his long, thick hair and short, close-curling beard being liberally touched with gray.
Reaching to the next great branch, she ripped that one down also, taking another great strip from the main trunk. Grôm saw that her purpose obviously was to pull the tree to pieces bit by bit, in order to get at her intended victims. Mawg apparently saw this also, and it was too much for him.
The peril of Mawg being thus removed from their path, they journeyed more swiftly; and when the next new moon was a thin white sickle in the sky, just above the line of saw-toothed hills, they came safely back to the comfortable caves and the clear-burning watch-fires of their tribe. Before the Caves of the Pointed Hills the fires of the tribe burned brightly.
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