er there.

Suddenly the wind cut off and the leaves once more hung motionless and
the heat clamped down again and that was the end of it. The _skun_ had
come and struck and gone.

Minutes, Duncan wondered, or perhaps no more than seconds. But in
those seconds, the forest had been flattened and the trees lay in
shattered heaps.

He raised himself on an elbow and looked to see what was the matter
with his foot and he saw that a fallen tree had trapped his foot
beneath it.

He tugged a few times experimentally. It was no use. Two close-set
limbs, branching almost at right angles from the hole, had been driven
deep into the ground and his foot, he saw, had been caught at the
ankle in the fork of the buried branches.

The foot didn't hurt--not yet. It didn't seem to be there at all. He
tried wiggling his toes and felt none.

He wiped the sweat off his face with a shirt sleeve and fought to
force down the panic that was rising in him. Getting panicky was the
worst thing a man could do in a spot like this. The thing to do was to
take stock of the situation, figure out the best approach, then go
ahead and try it.

The tree looked heavy, but perhaps he could handle it if he had to,
although there was the danger that if he shifted it, the bole might
settle more solidly and crush his foot beneath it. At the moment, the
two heavy branches, thrust into the ground on either side of his
ankle, were holding most of the tree's weight off his foot.

The best thing to do, he decided, was to dig the ground away beneath
his foot until he could pull it out.

He twisted around and started digging with the fingers of one hand.
Beneath the thin covering of humus, he struck a solid surface and his
fingers slid along it.

With mounting alarm, he explored the ground, scratching at the humus.
There was nothing but rock--some long-buried boulder, the top of which
lay just beneath the ground.

His foot was trapped beneath a heavy tree and a massive boulder, held
securely in place by forked branches that had forced their splintering
way down along the boulder's sides.

* * * * *

He lay back, propped on an elbow. It was evident that he could do
nothing about the buried boulder. If he was going to do anything, his
problem was the tree.

To move the tree, he would need a lever and he had a good, stout lever
in his rifle. It would be a shame, he thought a little wryly, to use a
gun for such a purpose, bu