The furry ears of the wolf-man, pricked up against the vaguely lustrous background of the river, fascinated me.  For all the world those pointed ears seemed to be listening.  But I knew they were dead and dried; that a man’s eyes were gazing through the sightless sockets of the beast.

From somewhere in the darkness the Mohican came gliding on his belly over the velvet carpet of the moss.

“Andastes,” he whispered scornfully; “they wear the heads of the beasts whose courage they lack.  Fling a stone among them and they will scatter.”

As I felt around me in the darkness for a fragment of loose rock, the Mohican arrested my arm.

“Wait, Loskiel.  The Andastes hang on the heels of fiercer prowlers, smelling about dead bones like foxes after a battle.  Real men can not be far away.”

We lay watching the strange and grotesque creatures in the starlight; and truly they seemed to smell their way as beasts smell; and they were as light-footed and as noiseless, slinking from bush to bush, lurking motionless in shadows, nosing, listening, prowling on velvet pads to the very edges of our rock escarpment.

“They have the noses of wild things,” whispered the Mohican uneasily.  “Somewhere they have found something that belongs to one of us, and, having once smelled it, have followed.”

I thought for a moment.

“Do you believe they found the charred fragments of my pouch-flap?  Could they scent my scorched thrums from where I now lie?  Only a hound could do that!  It is not given to men to scent a trail as beasts scent it running perdu.”

The Mohican said softly: 

“Men of the settlement detect no odour where those of the open perceive a multitude of pungent smells.”

“That is true,” I said.

“It is true, Loskiel.  As a dog scents water in a wilderness and comes to it from afar, so can I also.  Like a dog, too, can I wind the hidden partridge brood—­ though never the nesting hen—­ nor can a mink do that much either.  But keen as the perfume of a bee-tree, and certain as the rank smell of a dog-fox in March—­ which even a white man can detect —­ are the odours of the wilderness to him whose only home it is.  And even as a lad, and for the sport of it, have I followed and found by its scent alone the great night-butterfly, marked brown and crimson, and larger than a little bat, whose head bears tiny ferns, and whose wings are painted with the four quarters of the moon.  Like crushed sumac is the odour of it, and in winter it hides in a bag of silk.”

I nodded, my eyes following the cautious movements of the Andastes below; and again and again I saw their heads thrown buck, noses to the stars, as though sniffing and endeavouring to wind us.  And to me it was horrid and unhuman.

For an hour they were around the river edge and the foot of the hillock, trotting silently and uneasily hither and thither, always seemingly at fault.  Then, apparently made bold by finding no trace of what they hunted, they ranged this way and that at a sort of gallop, and we could even hear their fierce and whining speech as they huddled a moment to take counsel.