of the tent door was up, and I saw the branches and the stars and the white
moonlight. The shaking willows and the heavy buffetings of the wind against
our taut little house were the last things I remembered as sleep came down
and covered all with its soft and delicious forgetfulness.

Suddenly I found myself lying awake, peering from my sandy mattress through
the door of the tent. I looked at my watch pinned against the canvas, and
saw by the bright moonlight that it was past twelve o'clock--the threshold
of a new day--and I had therefore slept a couple of hours. The Swede was
asleep still beside me; the wind howled as before; something plucked at my
heart and made me feel afraid. There was a sense of disturbance in my
immediate neighborhood.

I sat up quickly and looked out. The trees were swaying violently to and
fro as the gusts smote them, but our little bit of green canvas lay snugly
safe in the hollow, for the wind passed over it without meeting enough
resistance to make it vicious. The feeling of disquietude did not pass,
however, and I crawled quietly out of the tent to see if our belongings
were safe. I moved carefully so as not to waken my companion. A curious
excitement was on me.

I was half-way out, kneeling on all fours, when my eye first took in that
the tops of the bushes opposite, with their moving tracery of leaves, made
shapes against the sky. I sat back on my haunches and stared. It was
incredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were shapes
of some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches swayed in
the wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes, forming a
series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly beneath the moon. Close,
about fifty feet in front of me, I saw these things.