life. All night long they carved wood and trimmed the skins of their storm furs and sewed them into the shape of a great beast, which they padded with cut branches. Woodbiter raided another trap, gaining a set of stag horns which they set in the jaws for teeth. Skyfire fashioned eight monster-sized imitations of a beast's clawed pads and, in the hour before dawn, announced that her 'snowbeast' was ready for action.

    'Strap these paws to your feet,' she instructed Sapling. Then, saving two of the clawed appendages for her hands, she called Woodbiter to her side and tied the last four on him, while Sapling experimented by making fearsome trails of beast-prints in the surrounding drifts.

    'That looks horrifying,' Skyfire observed when she finished, and allowed one very disgruntled wolf to clamber upright. 'But now I need you to help with the final touches.'

    The Huntress mounted the back of the wolf and placed the jaws of the snowbeast over her head. Muffled instructions emerged between the teeth, explaining that Sapling should place herself at Woodbiter's tail and lace the furs around them both, to flesh out the 'body' of the beast. After an interval of laughter, and much tangling of elbows, the task was complete. A fearsome apparition snorted and pawed at the snow in the hollow.

    'Now we make mischief on humans,' the voice of Skyfire proposed from the gullet; and the snowbeast shambled off, with a wolfish whine from its second head, to do just that.

    Once the two elves and the wolf coordinated with each other, they found they could run fairly fast; but the clumsy contraptions on their feet made silence impossible. Wherever the snowbeast passed, it made a fearful rattle, and the snapping of sticks and branches, added with the creak of its framework, carried clearly in the frosty air.

    'If there was any game in this forest, it's on the run now,' muttered Sapling. A giggle followed, half muffled by furs.

    * *Quiet, now,* * sent Skyfire. * ':'We've arrived at the first of the humans' traps.* * Now began the dangerous portion of their night's work; for dawn was nigh, and the results of the snowbeast's frolic must not be discovered too soon.

Quiet reigned in the forest until shortly past daybreak, when the