ours, maybe
less. And we have to stay with the river. To strike across country there
without good supplies and on foot is sheer folly."

Two days. With perhaps the Throgs unleashing their hound on land,
combing from their flyers. With a desert.... Shann put out his hands to
the wolverines. The prospect certainly didn't seem anywhere near as
simple as it had the night before when Thorvald had planned this escape.
But then the Survey officer had left out quite a few points which were
not pertinent. Was he also leaving out other essentials? Shann wanted to
ask, but somehow he could not.

After a while he dozed, his head resting on his knees. He awoke, roused
out of a vivid dream, a dream so detailed and so deeply impressed in a
picture on his mind that he was confused when he blinked at the
riverbank visible in the half-light of early dawn.

Instead of that stretch of earth and ragged vegetation now gliding past
him as the raft angled along, he should have been fronting a vast skull
stark against the sky--a skull whose outlines were oddly inhuman, from
whose eyeholes issued and returned flying things while its sharply
protruding lower jaw was lapped by water. In color that skull had been a
violent clash of blood-red and purple. Shann blinked again at the
riverbank, seeing transposed on it still that ghostly haze of bone-bare
dome, cavernous eyeholes and nose slit, fanged jaws. That skull was a
mountain, or a mountain was a skull--and it was important to him; he
must locate it!

He moved stiffly, his legs and arms cramped but not cold. The wolverines
stirred on either side of him. Thorvald continued to sleep, curled up
beyond, the pole still clasped in his hands. A flat map case was slung
by a strap about his neck, its thin envelope between his arm and his
body as if for safekeeping. On the smooth flap was the Survey seal, and
it was fastened with a finger lock.

Thorvald had lost some of the bright hard surface he had shown at the
spaceport where Shann had first sighted him. There were hollows in his
cheeks, sending into high relief those bone ridges beneath his eye
sockets, giving him a faint resemblance to the skull of Shann's dream.
His face was grimed, his field uniform stained and torn. Only his hair
was as bright as ever.

Shann smeared the back of his hand across his own face, not doubting
that he must present an even more disreputable appearance. He leaned
forward cautiously to look into the water, but that