fifth yielded a bag of flour, which he tore up and scattered all over
the place. The sixth inroad produced a haunch of venison, off which he
dined. The seventh showed another haunch, and this he buried somewhere
unseen in the shades. The eighth overhaul gave up some rope, in which
he nearly got himself entangled, and which he finally carried away,
bitten and frayed past use. The ninth search rewarded him with tea,
which he scattered, and bacon, which he buried.

What he could not drag out, he scattered. What he failed to remove, he
defiled. And, at last, when he had made of the place, not an orderly
_cache_, but a third-rate _débâcle_, he sauntered, always slouching,
always grossly untidy, hump-backed, stooping, low-headed, and
droop-tailed, shabbily unrespectable, out into the night, and the
darkness of the night, under the trees.

By the time day dawned he was as if he never had been--a memory, no
more. Heaven knows where he was!

Gulo appeared quite suddenly and very early, for him, next afternoon,
beside some tangled brush on the edge of a clearing. He was sitting
up, almost bolt-upright, and he was shading his eyes with his forepaws.
A man could not have done more. And, in fact, he did not look like an
animal at all, but like some diabolically uncouth dwarf of the woods.

A squirrel was telling him, from a branch near by, just what everybody
thought of his disgraceful appearance; and two willow-grouse were
clucking at him from some hazel-tops; whilst a raven, black as coal
against the white of the woods, jabbed in gruff and very rude remarks
from time to time.