II

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 halfway 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.

My first instinct was to waken my companion that he too might see them,
but something made me hesitate--the sudden realization, probably, that I
should not welcome corroboration; and meanwhile I crouched there staring