The Hobbit

crashes could be heard as the largest of the disturbed stones
     went bounding and spinning among the bracken and the pine-roots far below.
    “Well! that has got us on a bit,” said Gandalf; “and even goblins tracking us will have a job to come down here quietly.”
    “I daresay,” grumbled Bombur; “but they won’t find it difficult to send stones bouncing down on our heads.” The dwarves (and
     Bilbo) were feeling far from happy, and were rubbing their bruised and damaged legs and feet.
    “Nonsense! We are going to turn aside here out of the path of the slide. We must be quick! Look at the light!”
    The sun had long gone behind the mountains. Already the shadows were deepening about them, though far away through the trees
     and over the black tops of those growing lower down they could still see the evening lights on the plains beyond. They limped
     along now as fast as they were able down the gentle slopes of a pine forest in a slanting path leading steadily southwards.
     At times they were pushing through a sea of bracken with tall fronds rising right above the hobbit’s head; at times they were
     marching along quiet as quiet over a floor of pine-needles; and all the while the forest-gloom got heavier and the forest-silence
     deeper. There was no wind that evening to bring even a sea-sighing into the branches of the trees.
    “Must we go any further?” asked Bilbo, when it was so dark that he could only just see Thorin’s beard wagging beside him, and so quiet that he could hear the dwarves’ breathing like a loud noise. “My toes are all bruised and
     bent, and my legs ache, and my stomach is wagging like an empty sack.”
    “A bit further,” said Gandalf.
    After what seemed ages further they came suddenly to an opening where no trees grew. The moon was up and was shining into
     the clearing. Somehow it struck all of them as not at all a nice place, although there was nothing wrong to see.
    All of a sudden they heard a howl away down hill, a long shuddering howl. It was answered by another away to the right and
     a good deal nearer to them; then by another not far away to the left. It was wolves howling at the moon, wolves gathering
     together!
    There were no wolves living near Mr. Baggins’ hole at home, but he knew that noise. He had had it described to him often enough
     in tales. One of his elder cousins (on the Took side), who had been a great traveller, used to imitate it to frighten him.
     To hear it out in the forest under the moon was too much for Bilbo. Even magic rings are not much use against wolves—especially
     against the evil packs that lived under the shadow of the goblin-infested mountains, over the Edge of the Wild on the borders
     of the unknown. Wolves of that sort smell keener than goblins, and do not need to see you to catch you!
    “What shall we do, what shall we do!” he cried. “Escaping goblins to be caught by wolves!” he said, and it became a proverb,
     though we now say “out of the frying-pan into the fire” in the same sort of uncomfortable situations.
    “Up the trees quick!” cried Gandalf; and they ran to the trees at the edge of the glade, hunting for those that had branches
     fairly low, or were slender enough to swarm up. They found them as quick as ever they could, you can guess; and up they went
     as high as ever they could trust the branches. You would have laughed (from a safe distance), if you had seen the dwarves
     sitting up in the trees with their beards dangling down, like old gentlemen gone cracked and playing at being boys. Fili and
     Kili were at the top of a tall larch like an enormous Christmas tree. Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, and Gloin were more comfortable
     in a huge pine with regular branches sticking out at intervals like the spokes of a wheel. Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, and Thorin
     were in another. Dwalin and Balin had swarmed up a tall slender fir with few branches and were trying to find a place to sit
     in the greenery of the topmost boughs. Gandalf, who was a good deal taller than the others, had found a tree into which they
     could not climb, a large pine standing at the very edge of the glade. He was quite hidden in its boughs, but you could see
     his eyes gleaming in the moon as he peeped out.
    And Bilbo? He could not get into any tree, and was scuttling about from trunk to trunk, like a rabbit that has lost its hole
     and has a dog after it.
    “You’ve left the burglar behind again!” said Nori to Dori looking down.
    “I