Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/52

, and had made use of none of the precautions for the confusion of her trail such as are supplied by the baffling woodcraft of her people. This was as well, and saved the trackers much time; for the very existence of the Sâkai, it must be remembered, has depended for hundreds of years upon their ability to evade Malay slave-hunters.

At a distance of some eight miles from her starting point (it took Kûlop Rîau and his party nearly five hours to reach it) she had stopped in a little open glade of the forest to dance ecstatically with her slender, bare feet upon the rich, cool grasses beside a stream, which tumbled downward, with a mighty chattering, in the direction of the Tĕlom. Here she had bathed luxuriously in the running water, had stretched herself to enjoy a sun-bath upon a flat rock in midstream, and thence had pounced upon and captured with her hands a huge, fruit-eating krai fish. She had carried the creature ashore, had cleaned it and scraped off its scales, and pulled some rattan from the jungle, and had fashioned therefrom a knapsack into which she had stowed the fish. Thereafter she had climbed a hibiscus to rob it of its blossoms for her hair, had danced again in sheer joy of being alive, and then had continued her wanderings.

The tracks, as old Kûlop Rîau pointed them out to Kria, one by one, told the story of this little halting with such distinctness of detail that Pi-Noi's husband could picture to himself every act and motion of his wayward wife; could almost visualize