"Shoot, man! ten thousand devils, shoot! too late! Tree! tree!"and he dropped the cub, pushed Gerard across the road, and flew to the first tree and climbed it, Gerard the same on his side; and as they fled, both men uttered inhuman howls like savage creatures grazed by death.
With all their speed one or other would have been torn to fragments at the foot of his tree; but the bear stopped a moment at the cub.
Without taking her bloodshot eyes off those she was hunting, she smelt it all round, and found, how, her Creator only knows, that it was dead, quite dead.She gave a yell such as neither of the hunted ones had ever heard, nor dreamed to be in nature, and flew after Denys.She reared and struck at him as he climbed.He was just out of reach.
Instantly she seized the tree, and with her huge teeth tore a great piece out of it with a crash.Then she reared again, dug her claws deep into the bark, and began to mount it slowly, but as surely as a monkey.
Denys's evil star had led him to a dead tree, a mere shaft, and of no very great height.He climbed faster than his pursuer, and was soon at the top.He looked this way and that for some bough of another tree to spring to.There was none; and if he jumped down, he knew the bear would be upon him ere he could recover the fall, and make short work of him.Moreover, Denys was little used to turning his back on danger, and his blood was rising at being hunted.He turned to bay.
"My hour is come," thought he."Let me meet death like a man." He kneeled down and grasped a small shoot to steady himself, drew his long knife, and clenching his teeth, prepared to jab the huge brute as soon as it should mount within reach.
Of this combat the result was not doubtful.
The monster's head and neck were scarce vulnerable for bone and masses of hair.The man was going to sting the bear, and the bear to crack the man like a nut.
Gerard's heart was better than his nerves.He saw his friend's mortal danger, and passed at once from fear to blindish rage.He slipped down his tree in a moment, caught up the crossbow, which he had dropped in the road, and running furiously up, sent a bolt into the bear's body with a loud shout.The bear gave a snarl of rage and pain, and turned its head irresolutely.
"Keep aloof!" cried Denys, "or you are a dead man.""I care not;" and in a moment he had another bolt ready and shot it fiercely into the bear, screaming, "Take that! take that!"Denys poured a volley of oaths down at him."Get away, idiot!"He was right: the bear finding so formidable and noisy a foe behind her, slipped growling down the tree, rending deep furrows in it as she slipped.Gerard ran back to his tree and climbed it swiftly.But while his legs were dangling some eight feet from the ground, the bear came rearing and struck with her fore paw, and out flew a piece of bloody cloth from Gerard's hose.He climbed, and climbed; and presently he heard as it were in the air a voice say, "Go out on the bough!" He looked, and there was a long massive branch before him shooting upwards at a slight angle: he threw his body across it, and by a series of convulsive efforts worked up it to the end.
Then he looked round panting.
The bear was mounting the tree on the other side.He heard her claws scrape, and saw her bulge on both sides of the massive tree.
Her eye not being very quick, she reached the fork and passed it, mounting the main stem.Gerard drew breath more freely.The bear either heard him, or found by scent she was wrong: she paused;presently she caught sight of him.She eyed him steadily, then quietly descended to the fork.
Slowly and cautiously she stretched out a paw and tried the bough.
It was a stiff oak branch, sound as iron.Instinct taught the creature this: it crawled carefully out on the bough, growling savagely as it came.
Gerard looked wildly down.He was forty feet from the ground.
Death below.Death moving slow but sure on him in a still more horrible form.His hair bristled.The sweat poured from him.He sat helpless, fascinated, tongue-tied.
As the fearful monster crawled growling towards him, incongruous thoughts coursed through his mind.Margaret: the Vulgate, where it speaks of the rage of a she-bear robbed of her whelps - Rome -Eternity.
The bear crawled on.And now the stupor of death fell on the doomed man; he saw the open jaws and bloodshot eyes coming, but in a mist.
As in a mist he heard a twang; he glanced down; Denys, white and silent as death, was shooting up at the bear.The bear snarled at the twang.but crawled on.Again the crossbow twanged, and the bear snarled, and came nearer.Again the cross bow twanged; and the next moment the bear was close upon Gerard, where he sat, with hair standing stiff on end and eyes starting from their sockets, palsied.The bear opened her jaws like a grave.and hot blood spouted from them upon Gerard as from a pump.The bough rocked.
The wounded monster was reeling; it clung, it stuck its sickles of claws deep into the wood; it toppled, its claws held firm, but its body rolled off, and the sudden shock to the branch shook Gerard forward on his stomach with his face upon one of the bear's straining paws.At this, by a convulsive effort, she raised her head up, up, till he felt her hot fetid breath.Then huge teeth snapped together loudly close below him in the air, with a last effort of baffled hate.The ponderous carcass rent the claws out of the bough, then pounded the earth with a tremendous thump.
There was a shout of triumph below, and the very next instant a cry of dismay, for Gerard had swooned, and without an attempt to save himself, rolled headlong from the perilous height.