A little before noon, reaching the further end of one of the island-like promontories, he saw below him a pool at the mouth of a creek. Scrambling down the bank, he knelt among the stones to drink, and on raising his head immediately saw before him, some yards away on the creek's muddy, further shore, a bear's prints, clear as a seal on wax. Looking about him, he felt almost sure that this must be the place spoken of by the fishermen. It was plainly an habitual drinking-place, bear-marked so unmistakably that a child could have perceived the signs; and certainly visited at some time since the previous day.
To have seen the prints before his own feet had marked the mud was a stroke of luck which should make it simple, a mere matter of patience, to gain sight of the bear itself. All he needed was a safe place of concealment from which to watch. Splashing through the shallows, he made his way back as far as the next inlet, a long stone's throw from the pool where he had knelt to drink. From here he once more climbed the promontory to the ollaconda tree and, having made sure that he could observe the shore of the creek, lay down among the roots to wait. The wind, as the elder had said, was from the north, the forest on his left was so thick that nothing could approach without being heard; and in the last resort he could take to the river. Here he was as safe as he could reasonably hope to be.
While the slow time passed with the movement of clouds, the whine of insects and the sudden, raucous cries and scutterings of water-fowl on the river, he fell to reflecting on how the killing of Shardik might be accomplished. If he were right, and this was a drinking-place to which the bear regularly returned, it should afford him a good opportunity. He had never taken part in killing a bear, nor had he ever heard of anyone, except the Beklan nobleman of whom Bel-ka-Trazet had spoken, who had attempted it. Certainly a solitary bow seemed altogether too dangerous and uncertain. Whatever the Beklan might have supposed thirty years ago, he himself did not believe that a bear could safely be killed by this means alone. Poison might have succeeded, but he had none. To try to construct any kind of trap was out of the question. The more he pondered his difficulties, the more he was forced to the conclusion that the business would be impossible unless the bear's alertness and strength had become so much weakened that he could hope to hold it with a noose long enough to pierce it with several arrows. Yet how to noose a bear? Other, bizarre ideas passed through his mind – to catch poisonous snakes and by some means drop them out of a sack from above, while the bear was drinking; to suspend a heavy spear – he broke off impatiently. These childish plans were not capable of being effected. All he could do for the moment was to await the bear, observe its condition and behaviour and see whether any scheme suggested itself.
It was perhaps three hours later, and he had somewhat relaxed his vigilance, leaning his sweating forehead upon his forearm and wondering, as he closed his eyes against the river glitter, how Ankray meant to set about getting more food when what was in the house had gone, when he heard the sounds of a creature approaching from the undergrowth beyond the creek. The next moment – so quietly and swiftly may the most fateful and long-awaited events materialize – Shardik was before him, crouching upon the brink of the pool.
After war has swept across some farm or estate and gone its way, the time comes when villagers or neighbours, their fears aroused by having seen nothing of the occupants, set out for the place. They make their way across the blackened fields or up the lane, looking about them in the unnatural quiet. Soon, seeing no smoke and receiving no reply to their calls, they begin to fear the worst, pointing in silence as they come to the barns with their exposed and thatchless rafters. They begin to search; and at a sudden cry from one of their number come running together before an open, creaking door, where a woman's body lies sprawling face down across the threshold. There is a quick scurry of rats and a youth turns quickly aside, white and sick. Some of the men, setting their teeth, go inside and return, carrying the dead bodies of two children and leading a third child who stares about him, crazed beyond weeping. As that farm then appears to* those men, who knew it in former days, so Shardik appeared now to Kelderek: and as they look upon the ruin and misery about them, so Kelderek looked at Shardik drinking from the pool.
The ragged, dirty creature was gaunt as though half-starved. Its pelt resembled some ill-erected tent draped clumsily over the frame of the bones. Its movements had a tremulous, hesitant weariness, like those of some old beggar, worn out with denial and disease. The wound in its back, half-healed, was covered with a great, liver-coloured scab, cracked across and closing and opening with every movement of the head. The open and suppurating wound in the neck was plainly irritant, inflamed and torn as it was by the creature's scratching. The blood-shot eyes peered fiercely and suspiciously about, as though seeking on whom to revenge its misery; but after a little the head, in the very act of drinking, sank forward into the shallows, as though to keep it raised were a labour too grievous to be borne.
At length the bear stood up and, gazing in one direction and another, stared for a moment directly up at the mass of roots among which Kelderek lay in hiding. But it seemed to see nothing and, as he still watched it through a narrow opening like a loophole, me belief grew in him that it was concerned less with what it could see than with scenting the air and listening. Although it had not perceived him in his hiding-place, yet something else – or so it appeared -was making it uneasy; something not far off in the forest. If this were so, however, it was evidently not so much disturbed as to make off. For some while it remained in the shallows, more than once dropping its head as before, with the object, as Kelderek now perceived, of bathing and cooling the wound in its neck. Then, to his surprise, it began to wade from the pool into deeper water. He watched, puzzled, as it made towards a rock some little way out in the river. Its chest, broad as a door, submerged, then its shoulders and finally, though with difficulty, it swam to the rock and dragged itself out upon a ledge. Here it sat, facing, across the river, the distant eastern shore. After a time it made as though to plunge into midstream, but twice stopped short. Then a listlessness seemed to come upon it. Scratching dolefully, it lay down upon the rock as some old, half-blind dog might crouch in the dust, and covered its face with its fore-paws. Kelderek remembered what the Tuginda had said-'He is trying to return to his own country. He is making for the Telthearna and will cross it if he can.' If such a creature could weep, then Shardik was weeping.
To see strength failing, ferocity grown helpless, power and domination withered by pain as plants by drought – such sights give rise not only to pity but also – and as naturally – to aversion and contempt. Our sorrow for our dying captain is sincere enough, yet we must nevertheless make haste to leave this sunken fire before the increasing cold can overtake our own fortunes. For all his glorious past, it is only right that he should be abandoned, for we have to live – to thrive if we can – and setting aside all other considerations, the truth is that he has become irrelevant to the things that should now properly concern us. How odd it is that until now no one, apparently, should have perceived that after all he was never particularly wise; never particularly brave; never particularly honest, particularly truthful, particularly clean.