Early the next morning, the four were together again at the same point of safety and advantage, and again the frost-covered valley was a sea of silver, this time unmarred by the criss-crosses of feeding or hunting animals. There was no sign of life; no creature of the forest or the plain was so daring as to venture soon upon the battlefield of the rhinoceros and the cave tiger. Cautiously the cave men and their sons made their way across the valley and approached the pitfall. What was revealed to them told in a moment the whole story. The half-devoured body of the rhinoceros calf was in the pit. It had been killed, no doubt, by the tiger's first fierce assault, its back broken by the first blow of the great forearm, or its vertebrae torn apart by the first grasp of the great jaws. There were signs of the conflict all about, but that it had not come to a deadly issue was apparent. Only by some accident could the rhinoceros have caught upon its horns the agile monster cat, and only by an accident even more remote could the tiger have reached a vital part of its huge enemy. There had been a long and weary battle--a mother creature fighting for her young and the great flesh-eater fighting for his prey. But the combatants had assuredly separated without the death of either, and the bereaved rhinoceros, knowing her young one to be dead, had finally left the valley, while the tiger had returned to its prey and fed its fill. But there was much meat left. There were, in the estimation of the cave people, few more acceptable feasts than that obtainable from the flesh of a young rhinoceros. The first instinct of the two men was to work fiercely with their flint knives and cut out great lumps of meat from the body in the pit. Hardly had they begun their work, when, as by common impulse, each clambered out from the depression suddenly, and there was a brief and earnest discussion. The cave tiger, monarch of the time, was not a creature to abandon what he had slain until he had devoured it utterly. Gorged though he might be, he was undoubtedly in hiding within a comparatively short distance. He would return again inevitably. He might be lying sleeping in the nearest clump of bushes! It was possible that his appetite might come upon him soon again and that he might appear at any moment. What chance then for the human beings who had ventured into his dining-room? There was but one sensible course to follow, and that was instant retreat. The four fled again to the hillside and the forest, carrying with them, however, the masses of flesh already severed from the body of the calf. There was food for a day or two for each family.