CHAPTER ELEVEN

One more story we got from the Dean that night; he had met his friend again, the one that lived three overs away; he had come to the house we had heard of, running behind his cart. The Dean had gone up to him at once, or Wag, I should say, no doubt putting his nose right up to the other dog’s, and flicking it away and trotting off, and the other dog had followed.

‘I invited him to come hunting,’ said the Dean, ‘and he said he would like to, and we went off at once.’

‘What was your friend’s name?’ put in Wrather.

‘Lion-hunter,’ replied the Dean.

‘Did he hunt lions?’ asked Wrather.

‘No,’ said the Dean, ‘but he was always ready to, he was always expecting a lion in his garden, and he thought of himself as Lion-hunter, therefore it was his name.’

‘Did you think of yourself as Wag?’ asked Wrather, not in any way critically, but only, I think, to get the details right.

‘No,’ said the Dean, ‘I answered to it. I came to them when the Great Ones called that name. I thought of myself as Moon-chaser. I had often hunted the moon.’

‘I see,’ said Wrather.

And he had spoken so suavely that he never brought the Dean round, as I feared a jarring note might have done.

‘When we came to the wood,’ continued the Dean, ‘we examined several rabbit-holes; and when we came to a suitable one, a house with only two doors to it, and the rabbit at home, I set Lion-hunter to dig, and stood myself at the back-door. He did all the barking, while I waited for the rabbit to come out. Had the rabbit come out I should have leaped on him and torn him to pieces, and eaten up every bit, not allowing Lion-hunter or anyone in the world to have a taste of it. When my blood is up no one can take anything from me, or even touch it. I should have caught it with one leap, and killed it with one bite, and eaten even the fur. Unfortunately the rabbit lived deeper down than we thought.

‘But it was not long before a very strange and beautiful scent blew through the wood, on a wind that happened to come that way from the downs outside. We both lifted our noses, and sure enough it was a hare. We ran out of the wood, and we very soon saw him; he was running over the downs on three legs, in that indolent affected manner that hares have. He stopped and sat up and looked at us, as though he hadn’t expected to meet two great hunters. Then he went on again. We raced to a point ahead of him, so as to meet him when he got there, and we soon made him put down that other hind leg. Unfortunately before he got to the point that we aimed at, he turned. This happened to leave us straight behind him. We shouted out that we were hunting him, and that we were great hunters, Lion-hunter and I, and that nothing ever escaped from us, and that nothing ever would. This so alarmed him that he went faster. When he came to a ridge of the downs he slanted to his left, and we slanted more, so as to cut him off; but when we got over the ridge he had turned again. We shouted to him to stop, as it was useless to try to escape from us; but the tiresome animal was by now some way ahead. He had of course the white tail that is meant to guide us, the same as the rabbit has; and we kept him in sight for a long while. When he was no longer in sight we followed the scent, which Lion-hunter could do very well, though he was not as fast as I; and it led us to places to which I had never been before, over a great many valleys. We puzzled out the scent and followed on and on, and we did not give up the hunt until all the scent had gone, and nothing remained except the smell of the grass, and the air that blew from the sheep. Night came on rather sooner than usual, and we did not know where we were, so we turned for home.’

‘How did you do that,’ asked Wrather, ‘if you did not know where you were?’

‘By. turning towards it,’ replied the Dean. ‘I turned first, and then Lion-hunter turned the same way.’

‘But. how did you know which way to turn?’ persisted Wrather.

‘I turned towards home,’ said the Dean.

There was something here that neither Wrather nor I ever understood, though we talked it over afterwards, and I was never able to get it from the Dean. My own impression is that there was something concerned which we should not have understood in any case, however it had been explained. My only contribution to any investigation that there may be on these lines is merely that the queer thing is there: what it is I have failed to elucidate.

‘We turned towards home,’ the Dean went on, ‘and that led us past a lot of places I never had seen before. We passed a farm where strange people barked at us; and we met a new animal, with a beard and a fine proud smell. The question arose as to whether we should hunt him, but he lowered his horns at us, and jumped round so quickly that the horns were always pointing the wrong way. So we decided we would not hunt him, and told him we would come and hunt him some other day, when it was not so late and we had more time; and we went on towards home. Presently we saw a window shining at us, and it did not look right. It was a small house and all shut up, and it looked as though bad people might be hiding in it. I asked Lion-hunter if we should go up to the house and bark at them; but he thought that they might be asleep, and that it was better to let bad people go on sleeping. So we went by the lighted window, but it looked very bad in the night. Then the moon came over the ridge of the downs, but not large enough to be barked at. And then we came to a wood, and it turned out to be our own wood. And we ran down the hill and came to my house and barked under the window. And Lion-hunter said that he thought he would go back to his own house now, in case our door should open and anyone come out of it angry. And I said that that might be best. And the door opened, and a Great One appeared. And I said that I had been hunting and that I never would hunt again, and that I had stayed out much much too late, and that the shame of my sin was so great that I could not enter the house, and would only just crawl into it. So I crawled in and had a beating, and shook myself, and it was a splendid evening. I laid down in front of the fire and enjoyed the warmth of it, and turned over the memory of our hunt slowly in my mind; and the fire and my memories and the whole of the night seemed brightened by my beating. How beautiful the fire was! Warmer than the sun, warmer than eating can make you, or running or good straw, or even beatings, it is the most mysterious and splendid of all the powers of Man. For Man makes fire with his own hand. There is no completer life than lying and watching the fire. Other occupations may be as complete, but with none of them do the glow, the warmth and the satisfaction that there are in a fire come to one without any effort of one’s own. Before a fire these things come merely by gazing. They are placed in the fire by Man, in order to warm dogs, and to replenish his own magical powers. Wherever there is a fire there is Man, even out of doors. It is his greatest wonder. On the day that he gives to dogs that secret, as he one day will, dogs and men shall be equal. But that day is not yet. I stray a little, perhaps, from my reminiscences. These things are taught, and are known to be true, but they are not of course any part of my personal observations.’

‘Who discovered that?’ said Wrather before I could stop him.

‘We do not know,’ said the Dean.

‘Then how do you know it’s true?’ asked Wrather.

‘They shall be equal one day, and on that day,’ said the Dean.

‘What day?’ asked Wrather.

‘Why, the day on which Man tells dogs the secret of fire,’ I said to end the discussion.

‘Exactly,’ said the Dean.

I frowned at Wrather, for we were getting near something very strange; and though Wrather’s interruption did not bring the Dean back, as I feared every moment it might, we heard no more of that strange belief from him. He talked of common things, the ordinary experiences of a dog on a rug at the fireside; things that one might have guessed; nothing that it needed a spiritual traveller to come from a past age to tell us.