When, after a very long time, he reappeared upon his original track, it was as a dark blotch, indistinguishable from a dozen other dark blots of moon-shadow, creeping forward belly-flat in the snow.  This belly-creep, hugging always every available inch of cover, he kept up till he came to a big clearing, and—­there were the reindeer.  At least, there was one reindeer, a doe, standing with her back towards him—­a quite young doe.  The rest were half-hidden in the snow, which they had trampled into a maze of paths in and out about the clearing, which was, in fact, what is called their “yard.”

A minute of tense silence followed after Gulo had got as close as he could without being seen.  Then he rushed.

The reindeer swung half-round, gave one snort, and a great bound.  But Gulo had covered half the intervening space before she knew, and when she bounded it was with him hanging on to her.

Followed instantly a wild upspringing of snorting beasts, and a mad, senseless stampede of floundering deer all round and about the clearing—­a fearful mix-up, somewhere in the midst of which, half-hidden by flying, finely powdered snow, Gulo did his prey horribly to death.

There was something ghastly about this murder, for the deer was so big, and Gulo comparatively small.  The fearful work of his jaws and his immense strength seemed wrong somehow, and out of all proportion to his size.  This remarkable power of his jaws had that sinister disproportion only paralleled by the power of the jaws of a hyena; indeed, his teeth very much resembled a hyena’s teeth.

With the deer rushing all around him, Gulo fed, ravenously and horribly, but not for long.  A new light smoldered in his eyes now as he lifted his carmine snout, and one saw that, for the moment, the beast was mad, crazed with the lust of killing, seeing red, and blinded by blood.

Then the massacre began.  It was not a hunt, because each deer, thinking only of itself, feared to break from the trodden mazy path of the “yard,” and risk the slow, helpless, plunging progress necessary in the deep snow.  Wherefore panic took them all over again, and they dashed, often colliding, generally hindering each other, hither and thither, up and down the paths of the “yard” with the hopeless, helpless, senseless, blind abandon of sheep.  The result was a shambles.

This part we skip.  Probably—­nay, certainly—­Nature knows best, and is quite well aware what she is up to, and it is perhaps not meant that we should put her in the limelight in her grisly moods.  Suffice it to say that Gulo seemed to stop at length, simply because even he could not “see red” forever, and with exhaustion returned sense, and with sense—­in his case—­in-born caution.  He removed, leaving a certain number of reindeer bleeding upon the ground.  Some of them were dead.

In an hour dawn would be conspiring to show him up before the world, and he was not a beast sweet to look upon at that moment—­indeed, at any moment, but less so now.