Once, however, it was a herd of wild cattle, snorting, and tossing their wide, keen-pointed horns; and their trampling onrush filled the whole space so that the men had to plunge out into deep water to escape. Several, afraid of the big-mouthed, flesh-eating fish which infested the estuary at high tide, stayed too close in shore, and paid for their irresolution by being gored savagely. It was about the full of the moon and the time of the longest days, and the raft-builders toiled feverishly the whole night through. By sunrise Bawr and Grom estimated that there were rafts enough to carry the whole tribe, provided the present calm held on. They decided, however, to construct several more, in case some should prove less buoyant than they hoped. But for this most wise provision Fate refused to grant the time. A naked slip of a girl, her one scant garment of leopard skin caught upon a rock and twitched from off her loins as she ran, came fleeing down the hill-path, her hair afloat upon the fresh morning air. Straggling far behind her came a crowd of children, and old women carrying babies or bundles of dried meat. "They must not come yet. They'll be in the way!" cried Bawr angrily, waving them back. But they paid no attention--which showed that there was something they feared more even than the iron-fisted Chief. "There are none of the young women or the old men, who can fight, among them," said Grom. "A-ya must have sent them, because the time has come. Let us wait for the young girl, who seems to bring a message." Breathless, and clutching at her bosom with one hand, the girl fell at Bawr's feet. "A-ya says, 'Come quick!'" she gasped. "They are too many. They run over the fires and trample us." Grom sprang forward with a cry, then stopped and looked at his Chief. "Go, you," said Bawr, "and bring them to us. I will stay here and look to the rafts." Taking a half-score of the strongest warriors with him, Grom raced up the steep, torn with anxiety for the fate of A-ya and the children. It was now about three-quarters tide, and the flood rising strongly. By way of precaution some of the rafts had been kept afloat, let down with ropes of vine to follow the last ebb, and guided carefully back on the returning flood. But most of them were lying where they had been built, or left by the preceding tide, along high-water mark, as hopelessly stranded, for the next two hours, as a birch log after a freshet. As the old women with children arrived, Bawr rushed them down the wet beach to the rafts which were afloat, appointing to each clumsy raft four men, with long, rough flattened poles, to manage it. For the moment, all these men had to do was hold their charges in place that they might not be swept away by the incoming tide.