When Ogga left Lagk, he crossed the uplands with rapid strides. His hunter’s keen desire and ambition had been roused by the strange report which Lagk had made to him. Lagk had told him of a singular and monstrous beast which he had seen, almost casually, as the three travelers made their way up to the mountain ridge. In one of his rambling excursions he had entered a savannah-like level, which appeared to be a southern extension of the horse valley, where Ogga and Lhatto had witnessed the strange devastation of the equine host. Here he had been arrested by a squeaking grunt, and tracing the curious interruption, had detected in a grove of ash trees, assembled near a depressed and wet area of heavy grass, a new and formidable creature. It had a covering of tawny hair, it was standing on its hind feet, and was dragging down with its huge front hands the pendant branches. Lagk had not dared to approach it closer; its novel and whimsical homeliness had dismayed him. He had concealed his discovery until the episode of Ogga’s and Lhatto’s love duet suggested its useful interjection as a device for securing Ogga’s absence.
It was this anomalous and new animal wonder that Ogga was now in search of. Suspicion of Lagk’s intentions, suspicion of his truthfulness, at first deterred Ogga, but Lagk’s asseverations became so earnest, and the picture he drew was so inexplicable that Ogga felt drawn to the eccentric chase by curiosity alone.
He had crossed the open field and found its further end cut by a landslide which had scoured a broad concavity down the side of the mountain, heaping up at the limit of its denudation the accumulated earth into a huge mound, promiscuously mixed with projecting boughs and trunks and mangled roots of trees and with fragments of rock. The erosion formed a convenient line of descent for about half a mile. Ogga slipped down the irregular and smooth surfaces and reached the debris at its foot. Up that he ascended a short way, as far as its annoying entanglement of sticks and stones allowed, and there he could see far below him an opening in the unbroken wilderness which might be interpreted as the spot mentioned by Lagk.
He knew that their movement westward and south had brought them now to the west wall of the Horse Valley, and that this continuous triangle which seemed to form an avenue of indefinite extension, was characterized by many side outlets or tributaries running for miles up lateral ravines. Through these ravines a stream, rising at some higher elevation usually was conducted, and they were further distinguished by widenings or shelf-like expansions, free from trees, supporting a luxuriant herbage, and almost invariably provided with marsh-like bowls, where the water seemed to disappear or at best sluggishly emerge from its inferior limits. These ravines were very warm and humid, and by some occult reasoning, which bore no resemblance to the zoological deductions of a naturalist, Ogga thought this shapeless and sluggish beast, which fed on leaves and twigs, would be likely to find such places congenial to its unusual nature.