other. One thing he did know
for sure--he had no weapons. And that realization struck home with a
thrust of real and terrible fear which tore away more of the
bewilderment cloaking his mind.

Nalik'ideyu was impatient. Having advanced a step or two, she now looked
back at him over her shoulder, yellow eyes slitted, her demand on him as
instant and real as if she had voiced understandable words. Meat was
waiting, and she was hungry. Also she expected Travis to aid in the
hunt--at once.

Though he could not match her fluid grace in moving through the grass,
Travis followed her, keeping to cover. He shook his head vigorously, in
spite of the stab of pain the motion cost him, and paid more attention
to his surroundings. It was apparent that the earth under him, the grass
around, the valley of the golden haze, were all real, not part of a
dream. Therefore that other countryside which he kept seeing in a
ghostly fashion was a hallucination.

Even the air which he drew into his lungs and expelled again, had a
strange smell, or was it taste? He could not be sure which. He knew that
hypno-training could produce queer side effects, but ... this....

Travis paused, staring unseeingly before him at the grass still waving
from the coyote's passage. Hypno-training! What was that? Now three
pictures fought to focus in his mind: the two landscapes which did not
match and a shadowy third. He shook his head again, his hands to his
temples. This--this only was real: the ground, the grass, the valley,
the hunger in him, the hunt waiting....

He forced himself to concentrate on the immediate present and the
portion of world he could see, feel, scent, which lay here and now about
him.

The grass grew shorter as he proceeded in Nalik'ideyu's wake. But the
haze was not thinning. It seemed to hang in patches, and when he
ventured through the edge of a patch it was like creeping through a fog
of golden, dancing motes with here and there a glittering speck whirling
and darting like a living thing. Masked by the stuff, Travis reached a
line of brush and sniffed.

It was a warm scent, a heavy odor he could not identify and yet one he
associated with a living creature. Flat to earth, he pushed head and
shoulders under the low limbs of the bush to look ahead.

Here was a space where the fog did not hold, a pocket of earth clear
under the morning sun. And grazing there were three animals. Again shock
cleared a portion of Travis' bemused brai