prospect the pile of raft
material, choosing pieces which could serve for an outrigger frame. He
was handicapped as he had been all along by the absence of the vines one
could use for lashings. And he had reached the point of considering a
drastic sacrifice of his clothing to get the necessary strips when he
saw Taggi dragging behind him one of the jointed legs the wolverines had
put in storage the day before.

Now and again Taggi laid his prize on the shingle, holding it firmly
pinned with his forepaws as he tried to worry loose a section of flesh.
But apparently that feat was beyond even his notable teeth, and at
length he left it lying there in disgust while he returned to a cache
for more palatable fare. Shann went to examine more closely the
triple-jointed limb.

The casing was not as hard as horn or shell, he discovered upon testing;
it more resembled tough skin laid over bone. With a knife he tried to
loosen the skin--a tedious job requiring a great deal of patience, since
the tissue tore if pulled away too fast. But with care he acquired a few
thongs perhaps a foot long. Using two of these, he made a trial binding
of one stick to another, and experimented farther, soaking the whole
construction in sea water and then exposing it to the direct rays of the
sun.

When he examined his test piece an hour later, the skin thongs had set
into place with such success that the one piece of wood might have been
firmly glued to the other. Shann shuffled his feet in a little dance of
triumph as he went on to the lagoon to inspect the water-logged shell.
The scavengers had done well. One scraping, two at the most, would have
the whole thing clean and ready to use.

But that night Shann dreamed. No climbing of a skull-shaped mountain
this time. Instead, he was again on the beach, laboring under an
overwhelming compulsion, building something for an alien purpose he
could not understand. And he worked as hopelessly as a beaten slave,
knowing that what he made was to his own undoing. Yet he could not halt
the making, because just beyond the limit of his vision there stood a
dominant will which held him in bondage.

And he awoke on the beach in the very early dawn, not knowing how he had
come there. His body was bathed in sweat, as it had been during his
day's labors under the sun, and his muscles ached with fatigue.

But when he saw what lay at his feet he cringed. The framework
of the outrigger, close to completion the nig