For already I thought of the camp as home, and of this meadow as a
place where I had been held for a long time. It was a strange morning.
And so it was that even when I heard the thud, thud of a man's step
behind me I did not turn. A man's step is unlike an animal's, and I
had no doubt in my heart that a man was coming. But let him come to
me. My immediate and pressing concern was to repair my canoe that I
might get to camp, and I would squander neither movement nor eyesight
till that was done. A few moments before it had seemed a vital matter
to find what creatures they were that whispered and rustled past me in
the grayness. Now my anxiety was transferred.
The echoing fog played witchcraft with the step as it had done with the
other noises. The sound came, came, came,--a steady, moderate note; no
haste, no dallying, no indecision. Quiet, purposeful, controlled, it
sounded; that pace, pace, that came through the twig-carpeted timber.
The Greek Fates were pictured as moving with just that even
relentlessness of stride. Yet in life, so far as I have seen it,
tragedies commonly pounce upon us, like a wolfish cat upon her prey,
and we find ourselves stunned and mangled before we gather dignity to
meet the blow.
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