When Grom and his eager handful, passing a stream of trembling fugitives on the way, reached the level ground before the Caves, the sight that greeted them was tremendous and appalling. It looked as if some great country to the southward had gathered together all its beasts and then vomited them forth in one vast torrent, confused and irresistible, to the north. It was a wholesale migration, on such a scale as the modern world has never even dreamed of, but suggested in a feeble way by the torrential drift of the bison across the North American plains half a century ago, or the sudden, inexplicable marches of the lemming myriads out of the Scandinavian barrens that give them birth. The shrill cries of the women, fighting like she-wolves in defense of the children and the home-caves, the hoarse shouts of the old men, weak but indomitable, were mingled with an indescribable medley of noises--gruntings, bellowings, howlings, roarings, bleatings and brayings--from the dreadful mob of beasts which besieged the open space behind the fires. Some of the beasts were maddened with their terror, some were in a fighting rage, some only wanted to escape the throng behind them. But all seemed bent upon passing the fires and getting into the Caves, as if they thought there to find refuge from the unknown fear. At the extreme right of the line the two farthest fires were already overwhelmed, trodden out by frantic hooves, and three or four old men, with a couple of desperate young women, behind a barrier of slain elk and stags were fighting like furies to hold back the victorious onrush. Two of the old men were down, trodden out between the fires by blind hooves, and a third, jammed limply against the rocky wall beside the furthest cave, was being worried by a bear--hideously but aimlessly, as if the great beast hardly heeded what it was doing. There was something peculiarly terrifying in the animal's preoccupation.