The prowlers were going to be an enemy even more formidable than
Prentiss had thought.

The missing stakes were replaced the next day and the others were tied
down more securely. Once again the camp was prowler proof--but only for
so long as armed guards patrolled inside the walls to kill attacking
prowlers during the short time it would take them to remove the stakes.

The hunting parties suffered unusually heavy losses from prowler attacks
that day and that evening, as the guards patrolled inside the walls,
Lake said to Prentiss:

"The prowlers are so damnably persistent. It isn't that they're
hungry--they don't kill us to eat us. They don't have any reason to kill
us--they just hate us."

"They have a reason," Prentiss said. "They're doing the same thing we're
doing: fighting for survival."

Lake's pale brows lifted in question.

"The prowlers are the rulers of Ragnarok," Prentiss said. "They fought
their way up here, as men did on Earth, until they're master of every
creature on their world. Even of the unicorns and swamp crawlers. But
now we've come and they're intelligent enough to know that we're
accustomed to being the dominant species, ourselves.

"There can't be two dominant species on the same world--and they know
it. Men or prowlers--in the end one is going to have to go down before
the other."

"I suppose you're right," Lake said. He looked at the guards, a fourth
of them already reduced to bows and arrows that they had not yet had
time to learn how to use. "If we win the battle for supremacy it will be
a long fight, maybe over a period of centuries. And if the prowlers
win--it may all be over within a year or two."

* * * * *

The giant blue star that was the other component of Ragnarok's binary
grew swiftly in size as it preceded the yellow sun farther each morning.
When summer came the blue star would be a sun as hot as the yellow sun
and Ragnarok would be between them. The yellow sun would burn the land
by day and the blue sun would sear it by the night that would not be
night. Then would come the brief fall, followed by the long, frozen
winter when the yellow sun would shine pale and cold, far to the south,
and the blue sun would be a star again, two hundred and fifty million
miles away and invisible behind the cold yellow sun.

The Hell Fever lessened with the completion of the shelters but it still
killed each day. Chiara and his helpers worked with unfa