Did they not show a courage equal to mine by going every day to hunt in that wood which was inhabited by the daughter of the Didi?
I came to this subject with fear and trembling, but he took it quietly.
He shook his head, and then all at once began to tell me how they first came to go there to hunt.

He said that a few days after I had secretly disappeared, two men and a woman, returning home from a distant place where they had been on a visit to a relation, stopped at the village.
These travellers related that two days' journey from Ytaioa they had met three persons travelling in an opposite direction: an old man with a white beard, followed by two yellow dogs, a young man in a big cloak, and a strange-looking girl.

Thus it came to be known that I had left the wood with the old man and the daughter of the Didi.

It was great news to them, for they did not believe that we had any intention of returning, and at once they began to hunt in the wood, and went there every day, killing birds, monkeys, and other animals in numbers.
His words had begun to excite me greatly, but I studied to appear calm and only slightly interested, so as to draw him on to say more.
"Then we returned," I said at last.

"But only two of us, and not together.