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As she approached the caves she saw in the half light, and heard a
couple of jackals scuttle off, and immediately after a hyæna howled and
a dozen clumsy bulks went lumbering up the slope, and stopped and yelled
derision. "Lord of the rocks and caves--ya-ha!" came down the wind. The
dismal feeling in the she-bear's mind became suddenly acute. She
shuffled across the amphitheatre.
"Ya-ha!" said the hyænas, retreating. "Ya-ha!"
The cave bear was not lying quite in the same attitude, because the
hyænas had been busy, and in one place his ribs showed white. Dotted
over the turf about him lay the smashed fragments of the three great
lumps of chalk. And the air was full of the scent of death.
The she-bear stopped dead. Even now, that the great and wonderful Andoo
was killed was beyond her believing. Then she heard far overhead a
sound, a queer sound, a little like the shout of a hyæna but fuller and
lower in pitch. She looked up, her little dawn-blinded eyes seeing
little, her nostrils quivering. And there, on the cliff edge, far above
her against the bright pink of dawn, were two little shaggy round dark
things, the heads of Eudena and Ugh-lomi, as they shouted derision at
her. But though she could not see them very distinctly she could hear,
and dimly she began to apprehend. A novel feeling as of imminent strange
evils came into her heart.
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