ing; one of his long eyebrows was
nearly torn off. "The fires and the howls are cousins, little Mulgar,"
he said. "The screams of the golden-folk have roused the wolves, and if
we do not light big fires they will come down in packs along their
secret paths to devour us. It is a good thing to fight bravely, but it's
a better not to have to fight at all."

Nod came back and told this news to Thumb, who was sitting with a great
strip of his jacket bound round his head like a Turk's turban. "It is
good news, brother," he said--"it is good news. What stories we shall
have to tell when we are old!"

"But two of the hairy ones are dead," said Nod, "and one is slipping,
they say, from his second sleep."

"Then," said Thumb, looking softly over the valley, "they need fight no
more."

Nod sat down again beside Thimble's litter and touched his hand. It was
dry and burning hot. He heard him gabbling, gabbling on and on to
himself, and every now and again he would start up and gaze fixedly into
the night. "No, Thimble, no," Nod would say. "Lie back, my brother. It
is neither the Harp-strings nor our father's Zevveras; it is only the
little mountain-wolves barking at the icicles."

On either side of their camping-place he heard yelp answering to yelp,
and then a long-drawn howl far above his head. He began to think, too,
he could see, as it were, small green and golden marshlights wandering
along the little paths. And, watching them where he sat quietly on his
heels in a little hollow of the rock, it brought back, as if this were
but a dream he was in, the twangle of Battle's Juddie, the restless
fretting and howling of Immanala's Jaccatrays. As the Moona-mulgar's
fires mounted higher, great shadows sprang trembling up the mountains,
and tongues of flame cast vague shafts of light across the shadowy
abyss; while, stuck along the wall in sconces of the rock, a dozen
torches smoked.

Thumb grunted. "They'd burn all Munza up with fires like these," he
muttered. "Little wolves need only little fires." But Thumb did not know
the ferocity of these small mountain-wolves. They are meagre and
wrinkle-faced, with prick ears and rather bushy tails. In winter they
grow themselves thick coats as white as snow, except upon their legs,
which are short-haired and grey, with long tapping claws. And they are
fearless and very cunning creatures. Nod could now see them plainly in
the nodding flamelight, couched on their haunches a few paces beyon