They stole with silken pad behind my back and snarled when Ifaced them;the long,grey wolves with hanging tongues and staring eyes chased me to my cleft rock;there was no creature so weak but it might hunt me,there was no creature so timid but it might outface me.And so I lived for two tens of years and two years,until I knew all that a beast surmises and had forgotten all that a man had known.
"I could pad as gently as any;I could run as tirelessly.I could be invisible and patient as a wild cat crouching among leaves;Icould smell danger in my sleep and leap at it with wakeful claws;I could bark and growl and clash with my teeth and tear with them.""Tell on,my beloved,"said Finnian,"you shall rest in God,dear heart.""At the end of that time,"said Tuan,"Nemed the son of Agnoman came to Ireland with a fleet of thirty-four barques,and in each barque there were thirty couples of people.""I have heard it,"said Finnian.
"My heart leaped for joy when I saw the great fleet rounding the land,and I followed them along scarped cliffs,leaping from rock to rock like a wild goat,while the ships tacked and swung seeking a harbour.There I stooped to drink at a pool,and I saw myself in the chill water.
"I saw that I was hairy and tufty and bristled as a savage boar;that I was lean as a stripped bush;that I was greyer than a badger;withered and wrinkled like an empty sack;naked as a fish;wretched as a starving crow in winter;and on my fingers and toes there were great curving claws,so that I looked like nothing that was known,like nothing that was animal or divine.
And I sat by the pool weeping my loneliness and wildness and my stern old age;and I could do no more than cry and lament between the earth and the sky,while the beasts that tracked me listened from behind the trees,or crouched among bushes to stare at me from their drowsy covert.
"A storm arose,and when I looked again from my tall cliff I saw that great fleet rolling as in a giant's hand.At times they were pitched against the sky and staggered aloft,spinning gustily there like wind-blown leaves.Then they were hurled from these dizzy tops to the flat,moaning gulf,to the glassy,inky horror that swirled and whirled between ten waves.At times a wave leaped howling under a ship,and with a buffet dashed it into air,and chased it upwards with thunder stroke on stroke,and followed again,close as a chasing wolf,trying with hammering on hammering to beat in the wide-wombed bottom and suck out the frightened lives through one black gape.A wave fell on a ship and sunk it down with a thrust,stern as though a whole sky had tumbled at it,and the barque did not cease to go down until it crashed and sank in the sand at the bottom of the sea.
"The night came,and with it a thousand darknesses fell from the screeching sky.Not a round-eyed creature of the night might pierce an inch of that multiplied gloom.Not a creature dared creep or stand.For a great wind strode the world lashing its league-long whips in cracks of thunder,and singing to itself,now in a world-wide yell,now in an ear-dizzying hum and buzz;or with a long snarl and whine it hovered over the world searching for life to destroy.
"And at times,from the moaning and yelping blackness of the sea,there came a sound--thin-drawn as from millions of miles away,distinct as though uttered in the ear like a whisper of confidence--and I knew that a drowning man was calling on his God as he thrashed and was battered into silence,and that a blue-lipped woman was calling on her man as her hair whipped round her brows and she whirled about like a top.
"Around me the trees were dragged from earth with dying groans;they leaped into the air and flew like birds.Great waves whizzed from the sea:spinning across the cliffs and hurtling to the earth in monstrous clots of foam;the very rocks came trundling and sidling and grinding among the trees;and in that rage,and in that horror of blackness I fell asleep,or I was beaten into slumber."
CHAPTER VI
"THERE I dreamed,and I saw myself changing into a stag in dream,and I felt in dream the beating of a new heart within me,and in dream I arched my neck and braced my powerful limbs.
"I awoke from the dream,and I was that which I had dreamed.
"I stood a while stamping upon a rock,with my bristling head swung high,breathing through wide nostrils all the savour of the world.For I had come marvellously from de-crepitude to strength.I had writhed from the bonds of age and was young again.I smelled the turf and knew for the first time how sweet that smelled.And like lightning my moving nose sniffed all things to my heart and separated them into knowledge.
"Long I stood there,ringing my iron hoof on stone,and learning all things through my nose.Each breeze that came from the right hand or the left brought me a tale.A wind carried me the tang of wolf,and against that smell I stared and stamped.And on a wind there came the scent of my own kind,and at that I belled.Oh,loud and clear and sweet was the voice of the great stag.With what ease my lovely note went lilting.With what joy I heard the answering call.With what delight I bounded,bounded,bounded;light as a bird's plume,powerful as a storm,untiring as the sea.
"Here now was ease in ten-yard springings,with a swinging head,with the rise and fall of a swallow,with the curve and flow and urge of an otter of the sea.What a tingle dwelt about my heart!
What a thrill spun to the lofty points of my antlers!How the world was new!How the sun was new!How the wind caressed me!
"With unswerving forehead and steady eye I met all that came.The old,lone wolf leaped sideways,snarling,and slunk away.The lumbering bear swung his head of hesitations and thought again;he trotted his small red eye away with him to a near-by brake.
The stags of my race fled from my rocky forehead,or were pushed back and back until their legs broke under them and I trampled them to death.I was the beloved,the well known,the leader of the herds of Ireland.