The moon rose higher.  It disclosed the old Indian, as rigid as a rock, with his back to a white, barkless tree in which the sap had run dry a generation before.  As he stood there he heard a sound, and turned his face toward it, a sound that came from a mass of tumbled boulders, like the falling of a small rock upon a larger one.  And as he looked there came from the darkness of the boulders a flash of fire and the explosion of a gun, and as Mukoki crumpled down in his tracks there followed a cry so terrible, so unhuman, so blood-curdling that, as he fell, an answering cry of horror burst from the lips of the old warrior.  He lay like dead, though he was not touched.  Instinct more than reason had impelled him to fall at the sound of the mysterious shot.  Cautiously he wormed his rifle to his shoulder.  But there came no movement from the rocks.

Then, from half-way down the mountain, there came again that terrible cry, and Mukoki knew that no animal in all these wilds could make it, but that it was human, and yet more savage than anything that had ever brought terror into his soul.  Trembling, he crouched to the earth, a nameless fear chilling the blood in his veins.  And the cry came again, and yet again, always farther and farther away, now at the foot of the mountain, now upon the plain, now floating away toward the chasm, echoing and reechoing between the mountain ridges, startling the creatures of the night into silence, and wresting deep sobbing breaths from out of Mukoki’s soul.  And the old warrior moved not a muscle until far away, miles and miles, it seemed, there died the last echo of it, and only the whispering winds rustled over the mountain top.

CHAPTER XI

THE CRY IN THE CHASM

If Mukoki had been a white man he would have analyzed in some way the meaning of those strange cries.  But the wild and its savage things formed his world; and his world, until this night, had never known human or beast that could make the terrible sounds he had heard.  So for an hour he crouched where he had fallen, still trembling with that nameless fear, and trying hard to form a solution of what had happened.  Slowly he recovered himself.  For many years he had mingled with white people at the Post and reason now battled with the superstitions of his race.

He had been fired at.  He had heard the whistling song of the ball over his head, and had heard it strike the tree behind him.  For a time those rocks toward which he stared like fascinated beast had concealed a man.  But what kind of man!  He remembered the ancient battle-cries of his tribe, and of the enemies of his tribe, but none was like the cries that had followed the shot.  He heard them still; they rang in his ears, and sent shivering chills up his back.  And the more he tried to reason the greater that nameless fear grew in him, until he slunk like an animal down the side of the mountain, through the dip, and out again upon the plain.  And with that same nameless fear always close behind him, urging him on with its terrors, he sped back over the trail that he had followed that day, nor for an instant did he stop to rest until he came to the camp-fire of Rod and Wabigoon.