The trouble was the snow—­that was the rub, and a very big and serious rub, too, for him.  Now, if the snow had been a little less it would not have mattered—­a little more, and he could have run easily along the hard crust of it; but it was as it was, only about two feet, just enough to retard him, and no more.  And it is then, when the snow is like that, just above a couple of feet deep, that man can overtake friend wolverine—­if he knows the way.  Most men don’t.  On that he trusted.  At any other time—­but this was not any other time.

Sound carries a long way in those still parts, and as he hurried Gulo heard, far, far behind in the forest, the faint, distant whir of a cock-capercailzie—­the feathered giant of the woods—­rising.  It was only a whisper, almost indistinguishable to our ears, but enough, quite enough, for him.  Taken in conjunction with the mysterious shifting of the elk and the red deer and the reindeer and the wolf, it was more than enough.  He increased his pace, and for the first time fear shone in his eyes—­it was for the first time, too, in his life, I think.

A lynx passed him, bounding along on enormous, furry legs.  It looked all legs, and as it turned its grinning countenance to look at him he cursed it fluently, with a sudden savage growl, envious, perhaps, of its long, springing hindlegs.  Something, too—­the same something—­must have moved the lynx, and Gulo shifted the faster for the knowledge.

Half-an-hour passed, an hour slid by, and all the time Gulo kicked the miles behind him, with that dogged persistency that was part of his character.  Nothing had passed him for quite a while, and he was all alone in the utterly still, silent forest and the snow, pad-pad-padding along like a moving, squat machine rather than a beast.

At last he stopped, and, spinning round, sat up.  A gray-blue haze, like the color on a wood-pigeon, was creeping over everything, except in the west, where the sky held a faint, luminous, pinky tinge that foretold frost.  It was very cold, and the snow, which had never quite left off, was falling now only in single, big, wandering flakes.  The silence was almost terrifying.

Then, as Gulo sat up, from far away, but not quite so far away, his rounded ears, almost buried in fur, caught faintly—­very, very faintly—­a sound that brought him down on all fours, and sent him away again at a gallop with a strange new light burning in his little, wide-set eyes.  It was the unmistakable sound of a horse sneezing—­once.  Gulo did not wait to hear if it sneezed twice.  He was gone in an instant.  Man, it seemed, had not been long in answering that challenge of the cache escapade.

After that there was no such thing as time at all, only an everlasting succession of iron-hard tree-trunks sliding by, and shadows—­they ran when they saw him, some of them, or gathered to stare with eyes that glinted—­dancing past.  The moon came and hung itself up in the heavens, mocking him with a pitiless, stark glare. (He would have given his right forepaw for a black night and a blinding snowstorm.) It almost seemed as if they were all laughing at him, Gulo the dreaded, the hated hater, because it was his turn at last, who had so freely dealt in it, to know fear.