the females break bounds and spread over
the rocks carrying or pushing their young as if to get closer to the
fight, and then she saw the battle beginning to break. Here and there
bulls beaten and done for were taking to the sea and over all the beach
the fight had spread inwards towards the cliffs. The sea bulls were
beating the land bulls as a whole, interpenetrating them, getting closer
to the females, herding the vanquished out.

And she saw, now, as though a curtain had been raised, that the whole
great battle was between individuals.

The bulls fresh from the sea though attacking _en masse_ were under the
dominion of no enmity in common, each had come to find a rival and
having found him had no eyes for anything else. Nor having once
conquered did he pursue.

Another, and a wonderful thing, shewed up: the females had grouped
themselves as if to be taken, and now on the clearing beach could be
seen family parties, some under the dominion of their new lords and
masters, some still being fought for.

So it hung, dwindling little by little till at last only two warriors
were left like the last-blazing point of the fight.

They were the biggest of the two herds; they looked as though they had
been rolled in gore and they seemed equally furious and equally
exhausted. All their rage was in their eyes. Too beaten to bite they
could only boost one against another like two schoolboys trying to push
one another off a form.

It seemed a miserable and tame ending of their tremendous struggle and
she recognized, or thought she recognized, that the biggest of them was
the bull who had followed her that day like a dog towards the river.

This shouldering and pushing was his last effort to hold to his wife and
family. In war it is the last step that counts, could he make it? Then a
strange thing happened. The two monsters paused in their pushing,
relaxed, and seemed for a moment to forget the existence of one another.
That tremendous weariness lasted for a minute and then they woke up and
the biggest bull began to shuffle off to the sea.

His heart or his mind had failed him. The closer he got to the water's
edge the swifter he moved and the plunge of his body into the water was
the last sound of that battle.

Not a corpse lay on the beach, nothing but the victorious lords and
their ladies, and the lords seemed to pay as little attention to their
ghastly wounds as they did to their old or newly got wives, who, now
that