double-talk. After
all, how can we be _sure_ there are only three of us? We took over
the whole continent, remember."

"You know well enough, Johnny, there are no other humans back here
in North America. The farthest back any scientist will place the
migrations from Asia is 30,000 years. They haven't got here yet."

"Maybe we should have done it differently," mused Cooper. "Maybe
we should have included the whole world in our proclamation, not
just the continent. That way, we could claim quite a population."

"It wouldn't have held water. Even as it is, we went a little
further than precedent allows. The old explorers usually laid
claim to certain watersheds. They'd find a river and lay claim to
all the territory drained by the river. They didn't go grabbing
off whole continents."

"That's because they were never sure of exactly what they had,"
said Cooper. "We are. We have what you might call the advantage of
hindsight."

He leaned back against the tree and stared across the land. It was
a pretty place, he thought--the rolling ridges covered by vast
grazing areas and small groves, the forest-covered, ten-mile river
valley. And everywhere one looked, the grazing herds of mastodon,
giant bison and wild horses, with the less gregarious fauna
scattered hit and miss.

Old Buster, the troublesome mastodon, a lone bull which had been
probably run out of a herd by a younger rival, stood at the edge
of a grove a quarter-mile away. He had his head down and was
curling and uncurling his trunk in an aimless sort of way while he
teetered slowly in a lazy-crazy fashion by lifting first one foot
and then another.

The old cuss was lonely, Cooper told himself. That was why he hung
around like a homeless dog--except that he was too big and awkward
to have much pet-appeal and, more than likely, his temper was
unstable.

The afternoon sun was pleasantly warm and the air, it seemed to
Cooper, was the freshest he had ever smelled. It was, altogether,
a very pleasant place, an Indian-summer sort of land, ideal for a
Sunday picnic or a camping trip.

The breeze was just enough to float out from its flagstaff before
the tent the national banner of Mastodonia--a red rampant mastodon
upon a field of green.

"You know, Johnny," said Adams, "there's one thing that worries me
a lot. If we're going to base our claim on precedent, we may be
way off base. The old explorers always claimed their discoveries
for their nations or their k