The sloping beach gave way to a line of boulders a hundred yards inland, and these in turn marked the beginning of a steady rise in the land, its lower portion overgrown with bushes, loftier growth supplanting the underbrush as we stumbled upward over the rocks.
When we had traversed several hundred rods and knocked nearly all the skin from our legs against unexpectedly projecting stones, de Grandin called a halt in the midst of a copse of wide-leafed trees. “We may as well rest here as elsewhere,” he suggested philosophically. “The pack will scarcely hunt again tonight.”
I was too sleepy and exhausted to ask what he meant. The last hour’s events had been as full of surprises to me as a traveling carnival is for a farmhand.
It might have been half an hour later, or only five minutes, ju
