United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When he came to himself again, for days he would speak to no one, and it looked as if he would die, not of his wounds so much as of the insufficient will to live. But a chance word of the captive Ook-ootsk, who was being nursed back to life beside him, reminded him that there was vengeance to be lived for, and he roused himself a little.
Then the shaft snapped, Ook-ootsk sprawled forward upon his face, and the monster, in the paroxysm of its amazement and agony, leapt onward and plunged right over him, involuntarily hurling him aside and clawing most of the flesh off his back with a kick of one gigantic hind paw.
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.
A-ya's next shot missed; and then, screaming for the old men to come into the fray, she snatched up her stone-headed spear and ran around behind the nearest fire, expecting the bears to follow her and be led away from the hiding-place of the children. But she had forgotten that the slave, Ook-ootsk, with his twisted and shrunken leg, could not run.
Even the wailing old mourner, finding the excitement irresistible, forsook the body of her slain mate and came forward to take her share. Only the dead man, lying outstretched in the sun by the cave-door, and the crippled giant Ook-ootsk, away in the green hollow nursing his honorable wounds, had no part in the rejoicing, in this revel of the First Cooked Food.
The giant Ook-ootsk, hideous with his ape-like forehead, his upturned, flaring nostrils, his protruding jaw, his shaggy, clay-colored torso, and his short, massive, grotesquely bowed legs of which one was twisted so that the toes pointed almost backwards lay sprawling and chuckling benevolently near the entrance, while a swarm of little ones, A-ya's two among them, clambered over him.
Under her direction, the old men hauled the body from the fire by the hind-legs, and dragged it over to the edge of the bluff before cutting it up, for convenience in getting rid of the offal. Every one followed, to secure their due share of the tit-bits, except Ook-ootsk and one old woman.
Word Of The Day