ms, drove her short
spear half-way through its loins. Then, with one eye blinded and its
long fur smouldering, its rage gave way suddenly into panic. Lifting
its giant head high into the air, as if thus to escape its fiery
assailants, it turned and scuttled back the way it had come, while the
old men swarmed after it, belaboring and jabbing its elephantine rump
with their live brands.

A-ya, racing like a deer and screaming with exultation, ran round the
pack of old men and stabbed the frantic brute in the neck, with her
spear held short in both hands. Shrinking abjectly from this attack,
he swerved off toward the left. It was his left eye that was blinded,
and the other was full of smoke and ashes. He missed the path,
therefore, and plunged squalling over the edge of the bluff, which at
this point dropped about a hundred feet, almost perpendicularly, to
the beach. Rolling over and over, and bouncing out into space every
time he struck the cliff face he fell to the bottom amid a shower of
stones and dust, and lay there as shapeless as a fur rug dropped from
an upper window.

The old men, jabbering in triumph, craned their shaggy gray heads out
over the brink to grin down upon him, while A-ya, with a wild light in
her eyes and her strong white teeth gleaming savagely, turned back to
tend the wounds of her slave, Ook-ootsk.

II

Having assured herself that the hurts of Ook-ootsk, dreadful though
they were, were yet not mortal (our sires of Cave and Tree took a lot
of killing!), A-ya stepped over to the further fire to see about
rescuing the carcase of the slain elk before it should be quite burned
up. As a matter of fact, there was little of it actually consumed by
the fire, but it was amazingly shredded by the clawing of the blinded
bear; and an odor of roasted venison steamed up from it, which seemed
rather pleasant to A-ya's nostrils. 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. This old woman sat
rocking and keening beside the body of her mate whom the bear had
slain; while Ook-ootsk crawled off into a neighboring hollow to look
for certain healing herbs which should cleanse and astringe his
wounds.

The hide of the elk was too much burnt, too ripped and torn by the