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In Tyniec, in the inn under "Dreadful Urus," which belonged to the abbey, a few people were sitting, listening to the talk of a military man who had come from afar, and was telling them of the adventures which he had experienced during the war and his journey.
It is, however, beyond question that at a later era, namely, towards the close of the stone and beginning of the bronze period, the lake-dwellers had succeeded in taming that formidable brute the Bos primigenius, the Urus of Caesar, which he described as very fierce, swift, and strong, and scarcely inferior to the elephant in size.
He had seen in circuses the terrible urus, brought from wildernesses of the north, against which the most daring bestiarii went with dread, and which yielded only to elephants in size and strength. "Hast thou tried to take such beasts by the horns?" inquired he, with astonishment. "Till the twentieth winter passed over me, I was afraid," answered Ursus; "but after that it happened."
Even the huge cave bear shuffled aside as there came to him the scent of the invader. The aurochs and the urus, the towering elk, the reindeer and the lesser horned and antlered things fled wildly as the tainted air brought to them the tale of impending murder.
The glade of the wood was finally covered with the dead bodies of many different kinds of animals; but the hunt was not finished. In fact, the most interesting and also the most perilous moment was coming, because the huntsmen had met a herd of urus and bisons. The bearded bulls marching in advance of the herd, holding their heads near the ground, often stopped, as if calculating where to attack.
Not only the aurochs, the ancient bison, the urus, the progenitor of the horned cattle of to-day, wild horse and great elk and reindeer were seen within short distances from each other, but the big, hairy rhinoceros of the time was crossing the valley again and rioting in its herbage or wallowing in the pools where the valley dipped downward to the marsh.
To come to matters of certainty and not of speculation, we know that man by clearing the land, as well as by actively hunting and killing it, made an end of the great wild ox of Europe, the aurochs or urus of Cæsar, the last of which was killed near Warsaw in 1627. A few hundred, carefully guarded, are all that remain in the two continents.
He relates, with apparent belief, the existence of several extraordinary quadrupeds in the vast Hercynian forest, such as the unicorn of heraldry, which here first appears; the elk, which has no joints to its legs, and cannot lie down, whose bulk he depreciates as much as he exaggerates that of the urus or wild bull, which he describes as hardly inferior to the elephant in size.
No need existed for the risk of an open fight with this great beast. Craft must be used and Ab gave forth his swift commands. The Fire Valley leader had seen to it that his company had brought what he needed in his effort to kill the tiger. There were two great tanned, tough urus hides.
"Ho, he is a strong boy!" answered Macko, proudly. Meanwhile, the sound of horns and the barking of dogs stole nearer; all at once, at the right side of the forest, a heavy trampling resounded, accompanied by the crackling of broken branches and bushes then out of the thicket rushed an old bearded urus, with his gigantic head lowered, with bloody eyes and panting tongue, breathless and terrible.
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