Grunting with joy, the big bull now rolled happily in the shallows, and chewed up several bales of the nearer lily roots and leaves when he was done, actually diving for some of them, which made Hiero very nervous. Not until Klootz too was out on the beach and drying off under the warmth of the August night did the man totally relax.
Working by feel, Hiero shaved, a rough but adequate job, and even trimmed his short mustache and his black hair also, so that it hung less heavily over his ears. With a second set of clean leather clothes from the saddlebags and his old ones now drying over some stones, he was able to enjoy the feeling of content that comes from cleanliness after a prolonged spell of enduring compulsory dirt.
A little back from the beach, a spur of gray granite thrust itself out from the sand dunes which had flowed around it over the centuries. Here, the man thought, would be a good place to camp for a day. The rock furnished a shelter on its rearward face, away from the sea, where an overhanging shelf gave access to a narrow cave.
Soon all the contents of the bags were stowed in the cave, and Hiero and the bear were snoring away in close harmony, while the faithful Klootz, chewing his cud and belching comfortably at intervals, maintained an unwearied sentinel’s position just in front of the cave’s entrance. just as Hiero dropped off into a deep and untroubled sleep, he was conscious once again of the harsh, far-off screaming of many birds, and mingled with it this time, a muffled resonance, a faint vibration of some kind which he could not identify. Even while his tired brain attempted to form a coherent thought about the distant sounds, sleep overcame him.
He awoke in late morning, feeling better than he had in a week. Had it only been a week since he had left the unused, dusty road far to the North?
He went out of the little cleft in the rocks and found a warm, fresh breeze blowing from the lake, which was a sparkling blue, flecked with many whitecaps. Offshore, a great drift of swans was resting, honking and gabbling. They looked as if a great mound of soft snow had been sent down unseasonably from the High Arctic.
His two allies were so full of high spirits that they were playing a game out on the open sand. The small bear would charge at the morse, snarling in apparent savagery, and the big bull would try desperately to hook him with his palmate antlers, always “missing” by a least a full bear length. When that happened, the bear would tear around in circles, trying to catch his stub of a tail, while Klootz would rear up on his hind feet and paw the air madly with his immense, bony front legs and platterlike hooves.
