Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/172

164 occupations, and so deep and unfathomable was the stillness that it seemed to her that she could discern their each little motion. Sometimes it was the distant tread of the deer in the buckbush. No rains had fallen since April; the brush was dead and dry as she had never before seen it, and even the stalking folk made a misstep occasionally. She heard the Little People stirring in the leaves; once a gopher, once a porcupine rattled his quills with a pretended fierceness a short distance off the trail, and once a lynx mewed like a domestic cat behind her.

She hastened on. She turned into a little valley that she knew,—a place the mouth of which was obscured by brush and in which a wing of the flock might have been easily lost. And then she found the white band, bedded down for the night.

There had been casualties earlier in the evening, but mostly the beasts of prey had not yet found them. She started to drive them the long three miles back to camp.

Still the moonlight worked its conjurations in the forest; and she felt a growing discomfiture. At first she laid it to nerves. She had been tired after the day's ride, and perhaps the long walk after the sheep had overtaxed her already exhausted body. The sense of oppression, of distant and unfamiliar peril in the forests about her grew ever more pronounced. She tried in vain to hurry the sheep. Never, it seemed to her, had they moved so slowly. The first mile took