Darkness came twice, full of devils and danger; and still his obscure purpose held him and mastered his fears. He had passed over many hills and into a forest that was strange to him. He had eaten nothing but a snail or two since he left the squat, and for hours had drunk nothing but a handful of the dew he found trickling, in slow meagre drops, down the trunk of a tree and coaxed with infinite patience into his cupped palm. And he had met nothing human. At the beginning of the third darkness, crouching and shivering, he heard a mighty-snorting and stamping and the sound of breaking branches. The hunted beast, black in the half light, came within a hand’s touch of him and fell, pierced through the eye, no more than a dozen strides away. Its brazen screeching shook the world. The hunters, howling triumphantly, gathered round the carcass. They were foreign men; their garb and their gestures were outlandish; Ogo became rigid. A picture flashed into his mind: the boar plunging into its trap, a concealed pit; the hunters hurling stones upon it; its escape, by some magic; and this, the end of the chase. In and out of his mind the picture flashed, more quickly than the intake of a breath; and left no memory but only the certain knowledge that it had all happened so and so. The fear that had made him shiver now made him still. His mouth watered; his belly ached with desire; his lips curled back, baring the dog-teeth. Raw flesh and warm blood—in fancy he tasted them already. He was appetite. But he was something else as well, and that something else, that spark in the earth of him, saved him from running straight to his death. The hunters, a disorderly rabble, had leapt upon the carcass and were hacking at it with their knives and axes, and tearing at it with their long fingers. Their frenzy infected him with a like frenzy, but he controlled it. The danger he feared was not that of death or torture at the hands of this strange gang: his fancy did not stretch so far. What he feared most was to lose this chance of meat. The light was fast failing; the prancing figures appeared jet-black and their faces featureless; behind them a triangular patch of greenish sky was visible, framed by trees. Ogo was so near these strangers that he could hear their grunts, their panting breath; yet their yells and chattering, their greed and snarling anger, came to him swathed in the soft shadows of dusk and with an effect of remoteness. He was all intentness, every nerve taut with the ecstasy of crisis; yet there was something dreamlike, for him, in this unwonted waiting, this conflict of impulses. He was engaged in a new adventure, the adventure of thought.