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somewhere on the left in the direction they must needs take, they saw
suddenly first one bear and then two coming up the grass slope to the
right and going across the amphitheatre towards the caves. Andoo was
first; he dropped a little on his fore-foot and his mien was despondent,
and the she-bear came shuffling behind.
Eudena and Ugh-lomi stepped back from the cliff until they could just
see the bears over the verge. Then Ugh-lomi stopped. Eudena pulled his
arm, but he turned with a forbidding gesture, and her hand dropped.
Ugh-lomi stood watching the bears, with his axe in his hand, until they
had vanished into the cave. He growled softly, and shook the axe at the
she-bear's receding quarters. Then to Eudena's terror, instead of
creeping off with her, he lay flat down and crawled forward into such a
position that he could just see the cave. It was bears--and he did it
as calmly as if it had been rabbits he was watching!
He lay still, like a barked log, sun-dappled, in the shadow of the
trees. He was thinking. And Eudena had learnt, even when a little girl,
that when Ugh-lomi became still like that, jaw-bone on fist, novel
things presently began to happen.
It was an hour before the thinking was over; it was noon when the two
little savages had found their way to the cliff brow that overhung the
bears' cave. And all the long afternoon they fought desperately with a
great boulder of chalk; trundling it, with nothing but their unaided
sturdy muscles, from the gully where it had hung like a loose tooth,
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