at ready.

Once they had been held up for fifteen minutes while a massive donovan
tramped back and forth, screaming, trying to work up its courage for
attack. But after a quarter hour of showing off, it decided to behave
itself and went off at a shuffling gallop.

Duncan watched it go with a lot of thankfulness. It could soak up a
lot of lead, and for all its awkwardness, it was handy with its feet
once it set itself in motion. Donovans had killed a lot of men in the
twenty years since Earthmen had come to Layard.

With the beast gone, Duncan looked around for Sipar. He found it fast
asleep beneath a hula-shrub. He kicked the native awake with something
less than gentleness and they went on again.

The bush swarmed with other animals, but they had no trouble with
them.

Sipar, despite its initial reluctance, had worked well at the
trailing. A misplaced bunch of grass, a twig bent to one side, a
displaced stone, the faintest pug mark were Sipar's stock in trade. It
worked like a lithe, well-trained hound. This bush country was its
special province; here it was at home.

With the sun dropping toward the west, they had climbed a long, steep
hill and as they neared the top of it, Duncan hissed at Sipar. The
native looked back over its shoulder in surprise. Duncan made motions
for it to stop tracking.

The native crouched and as Duncan went past it, he saw that a look of
agony was twisting its face. And in the look of agony he thought he
saw as well a touch of pleading and a trace of hatred. It's scared,
just like the rest of them, Duncan told himself. But what the native
thought or felt had no significance; what counted was the beast ahead.

Duncan went the last few yards on his belly, pushing the gun ahead of
him, the binoculars bumping on his back. Swift, vicious insects ran
out of the grass and swarmed across his hands and arms and one got on
his face and bit him.

* * * * *

He made it to the hilltop and lay there, looking at the sweep of land
beyond. It was more of the same, more of the blistering, dusty
slogging, more of thorn and tangled ravine and awful emptiness.

He lay motionless, watching for a hint of motion, for the fitful
shadow, for any wrongness in the terrain that might be the Cytha.

But there was nothing. The land lay quiet under the declining sun. Far
on the horizon, a herd of some sort of animals was grazing, but there
was nothing else.

Then he saw the m