The sun came up, and the frost melted around us as we rode, giving place to a thin white mist lying close to the ground in the hollows. The horses waded through it as through shallow seas of gossamer as we dropped into the valley, and small bright drops trembled in the light, hanging from every dried hemlock head and half-silken, half-sodden feather of last year’s willow herb. And I remember that over the open fallow the larks were singing. In a sheltered hollow of the woodshore, the first hazel catkins were hanging out, and as we brushed through, shaking the whippy sprays, the air was suddenly stained with a sun-mist of yellow pollen for yards around. And I wondered how it all seemed to Ambrosius: whether he had yet freed himself utterly from the dearness and strangeness and piercing beauty of the world, from the lark song and the smell of melting frost on the cold moss under the trees, and the thrust of a horse’s flanks beneath him, and the faces of his friends. His own face betrayed nothing, but I thought that he looked about him from time to time, as though he wished to see very clearly the winter woods dappled like a curlew’s breast, the prick of a hound’s ears, the crimson thread tips of a woman-bud on a hazel spray, the flying shadow of a bird across the turf, to draw them in and make them part of himself, part of his own soul, so that he might carry them with him where he was going.
The hounds picked up the scent of the stag beside the pool where he had come down to drink at dawn, and the instant they were slipped from the leash they were off and away, filling the winter morning with their music under the high thin sounding of the hunting horn. So, following the hounds, and with the hunters running hound-swift alongside, we swung westward and up onto high ground. Ambrosius rode that day like a sound man. I have wondered since, if Ben Simeon had given him some such draught as they say the Jutes give to their berserkers, but I do not think so, I think it was something that, at God knows what cost, he himself had summoned up, the last valiant flare of a dying torch before it gutters out. He had drawn a little ahead of Aquila and me, and we glanced at each other and marveled; and young Gaheris had a look of puzzled hope as though he half believed his lord’s sickness was passing.
We hunted long and hard, and it must have been close on noon when, toiling up a slope of bare winter-tawny turf, we sighted our quarry on the skyline. A magnificent twelve-point stag, a royal hart, in the instant before he bounded forward over the ridge. Old Aquila sounded the View, and the hounds who, for some time past, had been running almost in silence, businesslike, muzzles to ground, broke out into fierce music and sprang forward with a burst of eagerness.
When we crested the ridge, the stag was nowhere in sight, but a few moments later he came into view again, flying like the wind above his own shadow along the opposite hillside. The hounds were hunting by sight now, and swung right-handed, streaming out on a line that would carry them straight across the valley to cut him off; but he saw us in time, and doubling in his tracks was away down-valley toward the refuge of the woods that crept up from the low river country, and for a while we lost him among the hazel scrub and thickets of thorn and wayfaring trees that were the outer fringes of the forest; and the music of the hounds turned thin and querulous. “He has taken to the water,” said the chief hunter, and we swung away down the riverside, splashing our way across by a shallow stickle, the hounds swimming for it, and pushed on down again, along the farther bank. Sure enough, a mile or maybe more downstream, at a place where the bank had been pulled away, exposing torn earth and a tangle of willow roots, the hounds picked up the scent again. Hunters and hunted swung back toward open country, for the quarry could not strike into the denseness of the damp-oak forest with its low growth of branches to entangle his antlers, any more than we could force a way through on horseback. And when next we had him in full view the great stag, though running swiftly as ever, was clearly laboring. “I think we have him!” I cried, and the big brindled hounds swept on, baying and belling. Our horses were tiring, but we urged them on to one last burst of speed. Ahead of us, the stag was slowing visibly, struggling on with his proud diadem of antlers lowered now; once he all but stumbled to his knees, then regathered himself and fled on in one last desperate flare of swiftness, with the hounds almost upon him.
Over a last hill shoulder and down into the valley beyond, stumbling and struggling through the sodden wreck of the past year’s bracken, with the brindled hounds running low and baying on his heels, and behind, crouched on our horses’ necks, we four, and Ambrosius’s hunters racing and leaping at our stirrups. In a narrow side combe, scarcely more than a stream channel down the slope of the hill, among flint boulders and the tangled roots and spiny maze of ancient thorn trees, the stag turned at bay; his head up, the great antlers like tree branches themselves; a king again, and no mere hunted fugitive, though his eyes were wild and his flanks sobbed in and out, and his nostrils seemed full of blood. And as we reined in below the great beast, there was a majesty about him that gave us all pause; not a hunted beast but a king brought to his death. Ambrosius flung up his hand, I remember, and it was as though brother greeted brother.
The brindled hounds checked an instant, then sprang in, yelling; the hunters making a wide bow on either side and siccing them on with jibes and encouragement in the dark tongue in which hunters talk to the hound pack. The rest of us dismounted, for it was impossible to take horses up into that steep tangle. But Ambrosius, who yesterday had been a dying man, had flung himself from the saddle, with the familiar hunting shout “I claim kill!” and was away ahead of us, scrambling among the tree roots and under the low thorn branches, and I caught the wintry light flash on the blade of the hunting knife in his hand.
He was among the hounds now, and I saw that he meant to make the kill himself. I had seen him do that before, in the Western hills when I was yet the height of another hound. It is accounted the crowning feat of a hunter, also the most hideously dangerous, work for a young man in the flower of his strength and speed; but to put oneself forward to aid in the kill after another man has cried his claim is one of the unforgivable things, and I knew also, as surely as ever I had known anything in this world, that Ambrosius had cried it for a warning to us to hold back from more than his kill. Only Gaheris, not knowing the truth, ran at lung-bursting speed to reach him against all the law of the hunting trail. But the boy caught his foot in a thorn root and fell headlong, driving the wind from his body, and by the time he had struggled still crowing to his feet again, and Aquila and I, with our own knives drawn, had come pounding more slowly up behind, the thing was finished.
Ambrosius had run in among the hounds that were yelling all about the stag as it confronted them with lowered head. Even as he did so, one of the dogs, impaled on a deadly tine, was flung aside with its belly split open like a rotten fig. I heard the dying howl of the dog, and in the same instant a strange cry of triumph from the High King. I saw him spring to meet the great animal, scarcely attempting to avoid the deadly antlers, seeming rather to court them as naturally as a man goes to his woman’s arms after a long parting. The upward thrust of the strong branched and weaponed head and the flash of the hunting knife came in the same bright splinter of time, and as though in a dream or at a great distance, I saw the crumpled body of a man who did not seem in that moment to be Ambrosius flung up as the dog had been, and slither writhing across the stag’s shoulders, and crash down untidily, all arms and legs, among the thorn roots and the boulders. Then the Red Lord of the Forest swayed and staggered a step forward and plunged down upon him.