did so only in snatches. The
apprehension which had come with the previous night was back,
intensified, and that lurking, indefinable fear rode them hard.

They were shaken out of their private terrors shortly after dawn. There
were always sounds to be heard in the jungle: the cries of unseen birds,
the crash of some tree eaten alive by parasitic sapping. But what broke
now was no bird call, no isolated tree falling. A trumpeting roar, the
crackling smash of vegetation, heralded a real menace. Asaki spun to
face northward, though there was nothing to be seen there except the
unshaken wall of the jungle.

"Graz! Graz on stampede!" Nymani joined his superior.

Jellico arose swiftly and Dane read on the captain's face the
seriousness of this. The off-worlder turned to his own men with a sharp
order. "On your feet! We may have to move on the double. Up-mountain?"
he demanded of the Chief Ranger.

The other was still listening, not only with his ears but with the whole
of his tense body. Three of the deer-like creatures they had hunted for
food broke out of the green wall, fled past the men as if the latter was
invisible. And behind them, the hunted now and not the hunter, came a
lion, its strikingly marked black-and-white hide dramatic in the light
of the morning. It showed fangs in a snarl and then was gone in one huge
bound. More deer things, scurrying of other small creatures, moving too
fast for clear identification, and behind them the fury of destruction
which marked the headlong advance of Khatka's largest mammals slamming
through the jungle.

They had started up-slope when Nymani cried out. A white bulk, hard to
distinguish in that light against the gray of the earth, headed after
them. Dane had a fleeting glimpse of curled tusks, of an open mouth,
raw-red and wide enough to engulf his whole head, of shaggy legs driving
at an unbelievable pace. Asaki snapped a beam from the needler. The
white monster roared and came on. They dived for the scant cover offered
as the graz bull died, not two yards away from the Chief Ranger, its
heavy body skidding along the earth with the force of its speed as it
went down.

"That did it!" Jellico sighted coolly with his blaster as a second bull,
fighting mad, tore from the jungle and pounded at them. Behind it a
third tusked head thrust out of the brush, large eyes searched for an
enemy. Dane studied the dead bull, but the animal did not come to life
this time. These were not