Then Laeg harnessed the horses and yoked the chariot.  To the brazen peaks of the chariot he fastened the heads of Foil and of Tuatha, with Foil’s on the left hand and Tuatha’s on the right; and the long-haired head of the water-wizard he made fast by its own hair to the ornament of silver that was at the forward extremity of the great chariot pole.  When this was done, and when he had secured his master’s weapons and warlike equipments in their respective places, the youths ascended the chariot, and Laeg shook the ringing reins and called to the steeds to go, and they went, and soon they were on the hard highway straining forward to the north.  The sound of the war-car behind them outroared the roaring of the flames.  Cuculain was a pale red all over, for ere the last combat was at an end that pool of the Boyne was like one bath of blood.  His eyes blazed terribly in his head, and his face was fearful to look upon.  Like a reed in a river so he quaked and trembled, and there went out from him a moaning like the moaning of winds through deep woods or desolate glens, or over the waste places of the earth when darkness is abroad.  For the war-fury which the Northmen named after the Barserkers enwrapped and inflamed him, body and spirit, owing to those strenuous combats, and owing to the venom and the poison which exhaled from those children of sorcery, that spawn of Death and Hell, so that his gentle mind became as it were the meeting-place of storms and the confluence of shouting seas.  A man ran before him whose bratta on the wind roared like fire, and there was a sound of voices calling and acclaiming, and a noontide darkness descended upon him and accompanied him as he went, and all became obscure and shapeless, and all the ways were murk.  And the mind of Laeg, too, was disturbed and shaken loose from its strong foundations.

“But now,” said Cuculain, “there ran a man before us.  Him I do not see, but what is this herd of monstrous deer, sad-coloured and livid, as with horns and hoofs of iron?  I have not seen such at any time.  Lurid fire plays round them as they flee.”

“No deer of the earth are they,” said Laeg.  “They are the enchanted herd of Slieve Fuad, and from their abode subterrene they have come up late into the world surrounded by night that they may graze upon Eiriu’s plains, and it is not lawful even to look upon them.”

“Pursue and run down those deer,” said Cuculain.

“There is fear upon me,” said Laeg.

“Alive or dead thou shalt come with me on this adventure, though it lead us into the mighty realms of the dead,” cried Cuculain.

Laeg relaxed his hands upon the reins and let the steeds go, and they chased the enchanted herd of Slieve Fuad.  There was no hunting seen like that before in Erin.  So vehement was the chase that a twain of the herd was run down and they upon their knees and sobbing.  Cuculain sprang from the chariot and he made fast one of the deer to the pole of the chariot to run before, and on to the hinder part of it to run behind.  So they went northward again with a deer of the herd of Hell running before them and another following behind.