tactics,
like rolling rocks at night upon its enemy? Unkillable because a
native tracker would cheerfully kill itself to protect the Cytha?

A sort of crisis-beast, perhaps? One able to develop intelligence and
abilities to meet each new situation and then lapsing back to the
level of non-intelligent contentment? That, thought Duncan, would be a
sensible way for anything to live. It would do away with the
inconvenience and the irritability and the discontentment of
intelligence when intelligence was unneeded. But the intelligence, and
the abilities which went with it, would be there, safely tucked away
where one could reach in and get them, like a necklace or a
gun--something to be used or to be put away as the case might be.

Duncan hunched forward and with a stick of wood pushed the fire
together. The flames blazed up anew and sent sparks flying up into the
whispering darkness of the trees. The night had cooled off a little,
but the humidity still hung on and a man felt uncomfortable--a little
frightened, too.

Duncan lifted his head and stared up into the fire-flecked darkness.
There were no stars because the heavy foliage shut them out. He missed
the stars. He'd feel better if he could look up and see them.

When morning came, he should go back. He should quit this hunt which
now had become impossible and even slightly foolish.

But he knew he wouldn't. Somewhere along the three-day trail, he had
become committed to a purpose and a challenge, and he knew that when
morning came, he would go on again. It was not hatred that drove him,
nor vengeance, nor even the trophy-urge--the hunter-lust that prodded
men to kill something strange or harder to kill or bigger than any man
had ever killed before. It was something more than that, some weird
entangling of the Cytha's meaning with his own.

He reached out and picked up the rifle and laid it in his lap. Its
barrel gleamed dully in the flickering campfire light and he rubbed
his hand along the stock as another man might stroke a woman's throat.

"Mister," said a voice.

* * * * *

It did not startle him, for the word was softly spoken and for a
moment he had forgotten that Sipar was dead--dead with a half-smile
fixed upon its face and with its throat laid wide open.

"Mister?"

Duncan stiffened.

Sipar was dead and there was no one else--and yet someone had spoken
to him, and there could be only one thing in all this wildernes