glinted--dancing past. The moon came and hung itself up in the
heavens, mocking him with a pitiless, stark glare. (He would have
given his right forepaw for a black night and a blinding snowstorm.)
It almost seemed as if they were all laughing at him, Gulo the dreaded,
the hated hater, because it was his turn at last, who had so freely
dealt in it, to know fear.

Hours passed certainly, hours upon hours, and still, his breath coming
quickly and less easily now with every mile, Gulo stuck to the job of
putting the landscape behind him with that grim pertinacity of his that
was almost fine.

At last the trees stopped abruptly, and he was heading, straighter than
crows fly, across a plain. The plain undulated a little, like a sea, a
dead sea, of spotless white, with nothing alive upon it--only his
hunched, slouching, untidy, squat form and his shadow, "pacing" him.
At the top of the highest undulation he stopped, and glowered back
along the trail.

Ahead, the forest, starting again, showed as a black band a quarter of
an inch high. Behind, the forest he had already left lay dwarfed in a
ruled, serried line. But that was not all. Something was moving out
upon the spotless plain of snow, something which appeared to be no more
than crawling, ant-like, but was really traveling very fast. It looked
like a smudged dot, nothing more; but it was a horse, really, galloping
hard, with a light sleigh, and a man in it, behind. The horse had no
bells, and it was not a reindeer as usual. Pace was wanted here, and
the snow was not deep enough to impede the horse, who possessed the
required speed under such conditions.