The Totems of Abydos

CHAPTER 38





Perhaps it was a whisper of scent, carried over the trees. Perhaps it was a sound, so far off that one could not be sure it was heard. Perhaps it was a sudden sense, or fear, or understanding, or something even subtler than these, as one commonly thinks of such matters, but, suddenly, the beast stood up, frightened, on the height of the cliff.

Something within it had seemed to shriek with misery, with a refusal to believe, with a rejection of an insistence. It was an inward shriek, or scream. It was as though of one forlorn, and abandoned. It was like the scream of a terrified child in the darkness, a bereaved child, in an empty house. It was a scream of terrible, profound, chilling loneliness. The beast stood, risen up, the wind cold in its fur, on the height of the cliff, lonely there, against the sky.

Then, in an instant, it had, in one or two movements, leaping, endangering even a body such as its own, as though insane, descended the cliff, left the platform behind, and bounded along the string, toward the village. In a moment or two it encountered three Pons making their way toward the platform. These small things cried out in fear, seeing it coming, and with such swiftness. It bounded past them, even before they had, in their terror, been able to react, even before they could flee into the brush or hide amongst the trees, so quickly had it come upon them. They turned, then, to watch it pass.

Scarcely a hundred yards from where the beast had encountered the Pons, coming to the platform, and cliffs, it stopped. There the trail of the small, eyeless one departed from the string. The string was not broken. He had not been pulled away from it, clinging to it. The string had not failed him. His trail left the string and set out, perpendicular to the string, leaving it behind. He had, it seemed, at this point, left the string of his own will. He had made his way into the darkness of the forest, enclosed in his own darkness. The footsteps, the beast noted, did not seem hesitant or fearful. It had left the string, it seemed, with a good heart. In the forest, as far as it could, within its limitations, it had not crept, but strode, even marched.

In a short while the beast came upon the first stains of blood, a moist darkness on the floor of the forest, and, a little later, uttered a terrible roar, and a stealthy one, scarcely pausing to discern the origin of that hideous sound, and without the least inclination to defend his dinner, or, indeed, to dispute any matter of significance, sprang away from a small form and disappeared in the brush.

The beast who had driven the other away did not make the prey its own. It did not crouch down to feed upon what it had won in one of the ways of the forest. Rather it stood over the small form, torn to pieces, half eaten, and howled with anguish. It then picked it up gently in its mouth, the head dangling to one side, half gone, and carried it to the village, where it deposited it before the gate. It then turned about and, rapidly, returned to the place where it had found the form. It would have been difficult to say how far the beast followed the trail of the stealthy one, or how soon the stealthy one, to its astonishment, as it had surrendered the prey, detected the renewed presence of the beast. We may conjecture that it fled before the beast for a long time. But one suspects, in spite of the speed, the stamina and cunning of the stealthy one, that there was really no escape for it, that it might have been, had it been required, pursued for days, for months, even for years, that it would have been followed beyond forests, beyond deserts, across grassy plains, and through arctic wastes, that it would have been followed, if necessary, to the very ends of the world, such was the tenacity of its pursuer. But in the morning, shortly before dawn, where two torches, perhaps in mourning, had been set at the gate of the village, the beast returned. In its jaws were the shreds of the stealthy one. Little but skin and threads of sinew held together the remains of it. It had been not only killed, but serrated, and disjoined, and ripped into ribbons of flesh. It had, apparently, long been fiercely shaken, as though in some frenzy of rage, or grief. These remains, such as they were, little more now than hair and hide, some loops of trailing intestine, and such, were left in the clearing, back from the gate. The beast did not put these remains in the same place where it had laid the small form earlier, but, rather, somewhat before that place, rather in the fashion of a token, or offering.

For several nights thereafter the Pons, even in their village, could hear the beast howling on the cliffs, seemingly in anguish.