The moonlight alternately grew and died as the moon passed in and out of the heavier cloud patches. Winds must have been blowing in the high lanes of the air, but there was no breath of them where Bruce lay. The forests were silent, and the little rustlings and stirrings that reached him from time to time only seemed to accentuate the quiet. He speculated on how many hours had passed. He wondered if he could dare to hope that midnight had already gone by and, through some divergence from wilderness customs, the grizzly had failed to return to his feast. It seemed endless hours since he had reëntered the empty rooms of Linda's home. A wave of hope crept through the whole hydraulic system of his veins. And then, as a sudden sound reached him from the forests at one side, that bright wave of hope turned black, receded, and left only despair. He heard the sound but dimly. In fact, except for his straining with every nerve alert, he might not have heard it at all. Nevertheless, distance alone had dimmed it; it had been a large sound to start with. So far had it come that only a scratch on the eardrums was left of it; but there was no chance to misunderstand it. It cracked out to him through the unfathomable silence, and all the elements by which he might recognize it were distinct. It was the noise of a heavy thicket being broken down and parted before an enormous body. He waited, scarcely breathing, trying to tell himself he had been mistaken. But a wiser, calmer self deep within him would not accept the lie. He listened, straining. Then he heard the sound again. Whoever came toward him had passed the heavy brush by now. The sounds that reached him were just faint and intermittent whispers,--first of a twig cracking beneath a heavy foot, then the rattle of two pebbles knocked together. Long moments of utter silence would ensue between, in which he could hear the steady drum of his heart in his breast and the long roll of his blood in his veins. The shadows grew and deepened and faded and grew again, as the moon passed from cloud to cloud. The limbs of a young fir tree rustled and whispered as something brushed against them. Leaves flicked together, and once a heavy limb popped like a distant small-calibered rifle as a great weight broke it in two. Then, as if the gods of the wilderness were using all their ingenuity to torture him, the silence closed down deeper than ever before.