Tree People and the Folk were not so
unlike.

I found him first, a little withered, dried-up old fellow,
wrinkled-faced and bleary-eyed and tottery. He was legitimate prey. In
our world there was no sympathy between the kinds, and he was not our
kind. He was a Tree-Man, and he was very old. He was sitting at the foot
of a tree--evidently his tree, for we could see the tattered nest in the
branches, in which he slept at night.

I pointed him out to Lop-Ear, and we made a rush for him. He started to
climb, but was too slow. I caught him by the leg and dragged him back.
Then we had fun. We pinched him, pulled his hair, tweaked his ears, and
poked twigs into him, and all the while we laughed with streaming eyes.
His futile anger was most absurd. He was a comical sight, striving to
fan into flame the cold ashes of his youth, to resurrect his strength
dead and gone through the oozing of the years--making woeful faces
in place of the ferocious ones he intended, grinding his worn teeth
together, beating his meagre chest with feeble fists.

Also, he had a cough, and he gasped and hacked and spluttered
prodigiously. Every time he tried to climb the tree we pulled him back,
until at last he surrendered to his weakness and did no more than sit
and weep. And Lop-Ear and I sat with him, our arms around each other,
and laughed at his wretchedness.

From weeping he went to whining, and from whining to wailing, until at
last he achieved a scream. This alarmed us, but the more we tried to
make him cease, the louder he screamed. And then, from not far away
in the forest, came a "Goek! Goek!" to our ears. To this there were
answering cries, several of them, and from very far off we could hear a
big, bass "Goek! Goek! Goek!" Also, the "Whoo-whoo!" call was rising in
the forest all around us.

Then came the chase. It seemed it never would end. They raced us through
the trees, the whole tribe of them, and nearly caught us. We were forced
to take to the ground, and here we had the advantage, for they were
truly the Tree People, and while they out-climbed us we out-footed them
on the ground. We broke away toward the north, the tribe howling on our
track. Across the open spaces we gained, and in the brush they caught
up with us, and more than once it was nip and tuck. And as the chase
continued, we realized that we were not their kind, either, and that the
bonds between us were anything but sympathetic.

They ran us for hours. The forest