So big were the flakes that progress was difficult from the first, and presently became impossible, the smaller and more heavily-laden girls could not be kept going. It was no use beating the stragglers. The old chief called a halt. When young things begin to get behind, someone will presently be missing. The braves, who had come upon bears' sign, might follow it up; but a camp must be pitched for the night at any rate, and the girls must drop their burdens and forth for firing before the snow covered all. Down went ill-secured bundles of skins, sheaves of assegais, wallets of jerked deer-meat, the miscellaneous lumber of a tribe of hunters, and out went the stick collectors; 'twas then or not at all.
A little girl near the edge of the covert saw the Master-Girl bending beneath a faggot, saw her drop it and run, heard her shriek "_Bear!_" There was a headlong race through swirling flakes over and under fallen trunks and laden boughs: five minutes later the last of the runners was safe in camp. The mother-squaws were scolding, counting, cackling, but where was Dêh-Yān? The hunters must be recalled, but were far ahead running a trail. By the time they were told of what had happened, and the pack had been lifted, the snow had covered all marks, indeed a good deal of property which had been thrown down in the confusion was temporarily lost. For the rest of the short dark day the braves cast forward up this gully and that glen, but it was upon their return that a hound scratched up from under a drift a skin wallet stiff and red. The finder of this grim relic brought it to the old chief in good faith. The elder looked, sniffed, snarled, "Fool!--this is not blood, but berry-juice!" whereat Gow-Loo, a somewhat jolter-headed young savage, slunk away cursing the lost girl and wishing the bear a good meal of her. Later he cursed her more bitterly still.
A hasty camp was pitched, ill-warmed, ill-lighted. The squaws huddled amid their shuddering children, the men never laid down their arms all night. A cannibal bear was the most terrible enemy known to the tribe; a taste for human flesh once acquired, and the fear of man once overcome, there was no knowing to what lengths such a beast might go. 'Twas opined to be no brown bear either, but a grizzly, or worse, a cave monster, one of the sort that even the lions feared, a brute that hung around the mammoth herd on its march, and occasionally cut off a calf. Nobody slept, and there was but one topic of conversation, the fate of Dêh-Yān.