back, clawing frantically up the slope that gave him little
footing; and he came back, no longer with poorly attempted simulation of
ferocity, but impelled by the first flickerings of real ferocity. He did
not know this. If he thought at all, he was under the impression that he
was playing the game as he had played it with Skipper. In short, he was
taking an interest in the game, although a radically different interest
from what he had taken with Skipper.

This time his teeth flashed quicker and with deeper intent at the jowl-
clutching hand, and, missing, he was seized and flung down the smooth
incline harder and farther than before. He was growing angry, as he
clawed back, though he was not conscious of it. But the mate, being a
man, albeit a drunken one, sensed the change in Jerry's attack ere Jerry
dreamed there was any change in it. And not only did Borckman sense it,
but it served as a spur to drive him back into primitive beastliness, and
to fight to master this puppy as a primitive man, under dissimilar
provocation, might have fought with the members of the first litter
stolen from a wolf-den among the rocks.

True, Jerry could trace as far back. His ancient ancestors had been
Irish wolf-hounds, and, long before that, the ancestors of the
wolf-hounds had been wolves. The note in Jerry's growls changed. The
unforgotten and ineffaceable past strummed the fibres of his throat. His
teeth flashed with fierce intent, in the desire of sinking as deep in the
man's hand as passion could drive. For Jerry by this time was all
passion. He had leaped back into the dark stark rawness of the early
world almost as swiftly as had Borckman. And this time his teeth scored,
ripping the tender and sensitive and flesh of all the inside of the first
and second joints of Borckman's right hand. Jerry's teeth were needles
that stung, and Borckman, gaining the grasp on Jerry's jaw, flung him
away and down so that almost he hit the _Arangi's_ tiny-rail ere his
clawing feet stopped him.

And Van Horn, having finished his rearrangement and repair of the
explosive-filled drawer under the mate's bunk, climbed up the companion
steps, saw the battle, paused, and quietly looked on.

But he looked across a million years, at two mad creatures who had
slipped the leach of the generations and who were back in the darkness of
spawning life ere dawning intelligence had modified the chemistry of such
life to softness of consideration.