Shardik by Richard Adams Page B

saiyett, it will be best if I go alone. The bear may be close and above all I must be silent.’
    *I will come with you,’ said Bel-ka-Trazet.
    He unclasped the chain at his throat, took off his fur cloak and laid it on the ground. His left shoulder, like his face, was mutilated - humped and knotted as the exposed root of a tree. Kelderek thought, ‘He wears the cloak to conceal it.’
    They had gone only a few yards when the hunter perceived the tracks of the leopard, partly trodden out by those of the bear. The leopard, he supposed, had been injured but had tried to escape; and the bear had pursued it. Soon they came upon the leopard’s body, already half-devoured by vermin and insects. There were no signs of a struggle and the bear’s trail led on through the bushes to emerge in open, stone-strewn woodland. Here, for the first time, it was possible to see some distance ahead between the trees. They halted on the edge of the undergrowth, listening and watching, but nothing moved and a ll was quiet save for the chitte ring of parakeets in the branches.
    ‘No harm in the women coming this far,’ said Bel-ka-Trazet in his ear: and a moment later he had slipped noiselessly back into the undergrowth.
    Kelderek , left alone, tried to guess which way the bear might have taken. The stony ground showed no tracks, however, and he felt himself at a loss. The Baron did not return and he wondered whether perhaps Melathys might have fainted or been taken ill. At last, growing weary of waiting, he counted a hundred paces to his right and then began to move slowly in a wide half-circle, examining the ground for the least sign - tracks, claw-marks, droppings or shreds of hair.
    He had completed perhaps half this task without success when he came once more to the edge of a belt of undergrowth. It did not extend far, for he could glimpse open ground beyond. On impulse he crept through it and came out at the top of a grassy slope, bordered on each side by forest and stretching away to the norther n shore of the island and the Telthe arna beyond. Some little way from where he stood was a hollow - a kind of pit about a stone’s throw across. It was surrounded by bushes and tall weeds, and from somewhere in the same direction came a faint sound of water. He might as well go and drink, he thought, before returning. To recover the bear’s tracks, now that they had lost them, would probably prove a long and arduous business.
    Setti ng off across the open ground, he saw that there was indeed a brook running down the slope beyond the hollow. The hollow was not dire ctly in his way, but out of mere curiosity he turned aside and looked down into it. Instantl y he dropped on his hands and knees, concealing himself behind a thick clump of weeds near the verge.
    He could feel the pulse behind his knee like a finger plucking the tendon and his heart was beating so viol ently that he seemed to hear it. He waited, but there was no other sound. Cauti ously he raised his head and looked down once more.
    In contrast to the heat-parched forest all about, the ground below was fresh and verdant. On one side grew an oak, its lower branches level with the top of the pit and spreading over the ground near the brink. The foot of the trunk was surrounded by short, smooth turf and close by, in its shade, lay a shallow pool. There was no outfall and, as he watched, the water, still as glass, reflected two duck, which flew across a shield-shaped cloud, wheeled in the blue and passed out of sight. Along the further edge rose a bank and over this grew a tangle of trepsis vine - a kind of wild marrow, with rough leaves and trumpet-shaped, scarlet flowers.
    Among the trepsis the bear was lying on its side, its head drooping towards the water. The eyes were closed, the jaws a little open and the tongue protruding. Seeing for the second ti me its enormous shoulders and the unbelievable size of its body, the hunter was possessed by the same trance-like sense of unreality