Findelkind did not weep, or scream, or tremble; his heart
seemed frozen, like the dead lambs.

It was he who had killed them.

He rose up and gathered them in his arms, and cuddled them in
the skirts of his sheepskin tunic, and cast his staff away that
he might carry them, and so, with their weight, set his face to
the snow and the wind once more, and began his downward way.

Once a great sob shook him; that was all. Now he had no fear.

The night might have been noonday, the snow-storm might have
been summer, for aught that he knew or cared.

Long and weary was the way, and often he stumbled and had to
rest; often the terrible sleep of the snow lay heavy on his
eyelids, and he longed to lie down and be at rest, as the little
brothers were; often it seemed to him that he would never reach
home again. But he shook the lethargy off him, and resisted the
longing, and held on his way; he knew that his mother would mourn
for him as Katte mourned for the lambs. At length, through all
difficulty and danger, when his light had spent itself, and his
strength had well-nigh spent itself too, his feet touched the old
highroad. There were flickering torches and many people, and loud
cries around the church, as there had been four hundred years
before, when the last sacrament had been said in the valley for
the hunter-king in peril above.