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Far into the twilight the sound of hacking was heard from the
squatting-places. It was the men sharpening their ashen spears against
the hunting of the morrow. And in the night, early before the moon
rose, the lion came and took the girl of Siss the Tracker.
In the morning before the sun had risen, Siss the Tracker, and the lad
Wau-Hau, who now chipped flints, and One Eye, and Bo, and the
Snail-eater, the two red-haired men, and Cat's-skin and Snake, all the
men that were left alive of the Sons of Uya, taking their ash spears and
their smiting-stones, and with throwing-stones in the beast-paw bags,
started forth upon the trail of Ugh-lomi through the hawthorn thickets
where Yaaa the Rhinoceros and his brothers were feeding, and up the bare
downland towards the beechwoods.
That night the fires burnt high and fierce, as the waxing moon set, and
the lion left the crouching women and children in peace.
And the next day, while the sun was still high, the hunters
returned--all save One Eye, who lay dead with a smashed skull at the
foot of the ledge. (When Ugh-lomi came back that evening from stalking
the horses, he found the vultures already busy over him.) And with them
the hunters brought Eudena bruised and wounded, but alive. That had been
the strange order of the shrivelled old woman, that she was to be
brought alive--"She is no kill for us. She is for Uya the Lion." Her
hands were tied with thongs, as though she had been a man, and she came
weary and drooping--her hair over her eyes and matted with blood. They
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