There was a sense of disturbance in my
immediate neighborhood.
I sat up quickly and looked out. The trees were swaying violently to and
fro as the gusts smote them, but our little bit of green canvas lay snugly
safe in the hollow, for the wind passed over it without meeting enough
resistance to make it vicious. The feeling of disquietude did not pass,
however, and I crawled quietly out of the tent to see if our belongings
were safe. I moved carefully so as not to waken my companion. A curious
excitement was on me.
I was half-way out, kneeling on all fours, when my eye first took in that
the tops of the bushes opposite, with their moving tracery of leaves, made
shapes against the sky. I sat back on my haunches and stared. It was
incredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were shapes
of some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches swayed in
the wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes, forming a
series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly beneath the moon. Close,
about fifty feet in front of me, I saw these things.
My first instinct was to waken my companion, that he too might see them,
but something made me hesitate--the sudden realization, probably, that I
should not welcome corroboration; and meanwhile I crouched there staring in
amazement with smarting eyes. I was wide awake. I remember saying to myself
that I was not dreaming.
They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the
tops of the bushes--immense, bronze-colored, moving, and wholly independent
of the swaying of the branches.
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