ing length of wood
from the fire and waved it frantically until it burst into a blaze and
became a torch. Rifle grasped in one hand and the torch in the other,
he plunged into the underbrush. Little chittering things fled to
escape him.

He did not find the Cytha. He found chewed-up bushes and soil churned
by flying metal, and he found five lumps of flesh and fur, and these
he brought back to the fire.

Now the fear that had been stalking him, keeping just beyond his
reach, walked out from the shadows and hunkered by the campfire with
him.

He placed the rifle within easy reach and arranged the five bloody
chunks on the ground close to the fire and he tried with trembling
fingers to restore them to the shape they'd been before the bullets
struck them. And that was a good one, he thought with grim irony,
because they had no shape. They had been part of the Cytha and you
killed a Cytha inch by inch, not with a single shot. You knocked a
pound of meat off it the first time, and the next time you shot off
another pound or two, and if you got enough shots at it, you finally
carved it down to size and maybe you could kill it then, although he
wasn't sure.

He was afraid. He admitted that he was and he squatted there and
watched his fingers shake and he kept his jaws clamped tight to stop
the chatter of his teeth.

The fear had been getting closer all the time; he knew it had moved in
by a step or two when Sipar cut its throat, and why in the name of God
had the damn fool done it? It made no sense at all. He had wondered
about Sipar's loyalties, and the very loyalties that he had dismissed
as a sheer impossibility had been the answer, after all. In the end,
for some obscure reason--obscure to humans, that is--Sipar's loyalty
had been to the Cytha.

But then what was the use of searching for any reason in it? Nothing
that had happened made any sense. It made no sense that a beast one
was pursuing should up and talk to one--although it did fit in with
the theory of the crisis-beast he had fashioned in his mind.

* * * * *

Progressive adaptation, he told himself. Carry adaptation far enough
and you'd reach communication. But might not the Cytha's power of
adaptation be running down? Had the Cytha gone about as far as it
could force itself to go? Maybe so, he thought. It might be worth a
gamble. Sipar's suicide, for all its casualness, bore the overtones of
last-notch desperation. And th