And that is how Bruce Folger returned to the land of his birth--as most men do, unless death cheats them first--and how he made a pact to pay old debts of death. BOOK TWO THE BLOOD ATONEMENT XI "Men own the day, but the night is ours," is an old saying among the wild folk that inhabit the forests of Trail's End. And the saying has really deep significances that can't be discerned at one hearing. Perhaps human beings--their thoughts busy with other things--can never really get them at all. But the mountain lion--purring a sort of queer, singsong lullaby to her wicked-eyed little cubs in the lair--and the gray wolf, running along the ridges in the mystery of the moon--and those lesser hunters, starting with Tuft-ear the lynx and going all the way down to that terrible, white-toothed cutthroat, Little Death the mink--_they_ know exactly what the saying means, and they know that it is true. The only one of the larger forest creatures that doesn't know is old Ashur, the black bear (_Ashur_ means black in an ancient tongue, just as _Brunn_ means brown, and the common Oregon bear is usually decidedly black) and the fact that he doesn't is curious in itself. In most ways Ashur has more intelligence than all the others put together; but he is also the most indifferent. He is not a hunter; and he doesn't care who owns anything as long as there are plenty of bee trees to mop out with his clumsy paw, and plenty of grubs under the rotten logs. The saying originated long and long ago when the world was quite young. Before that time, likely enough, the beasts owned both the day and the night, and you can imagine them denying man's superiority just as long as possible. But they came to it in the end, and perhaps now they are beginning to be doubtful whether they still hold dominion over the night hours. You can fancy the forest people whispering the saying back and forth, using it as a password when they meet on the trails, and trying their best to believe it. "Man owns the day but the night is ours," the coyotes whisper between sobs. In a world where men have slowly, steadily conquered all the wild creatures, killed them and driven them away, their one consolation lies in the fact that when the dark comes down their old preëminence returns to them.