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no signs of the red thing, but as he was rather hungry he did not loiter
long that night, but pushed on to pick up a red deer fawn. He forgot
about the drab animals. He found a fawn, but the doe was close by and
made an ugly fight for her young. Andoo had to leave the fawn, but as
her blood was up she stuck to the attack, and at last he got in a blow
of his paw on her nose, and so got hold of her. More meat but less
delicacy, and the she-bear, following, had her share. The next
afternoon, curiously enough, the very fellow of the first white rock
fell, and smashed precisely according to precedent.
The aim of the third, that fell the night after, however, was better. It
hit Andoo's unspeculative skull with a crack that echoed up the cliff,
and the white fragments went dancing to all the points of the compass.
The she-bear coming after him and sniffing curiously at him, found him
lying in an odd sort of attitude, with his head wet and all out of
shape. She was a young she-bear, and inexperienced, and having sniffed
about him for some time and licked him a little, and so forth, she
decided to leave him until the odd mood had passed, and went on her
hunting alone.
She looked up the fawn of the red doe they had killed two nights ago,
and found it. But it was lonely hunting without Andoo, and she returned
caveward before dawn. The sky was grey and overcast, the trees up the
gorge were black and unfamiliar, and into her ursine mind came a dim
sense of strange and dreary happenings. She lifted up her voice and
called Andoo by name. The sides of the gorge re-echoed her.
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