rveying the twitching crumpled body, must have hit the thing in the
head, stunning it. Then the momentum of its charge had carried it full
force against the rock to kill it. Blind luck--or the power of the
_ga-n_? He pulled back as the coyotes came padding up shoulder to
shoulder to inspect the kill. It was truly more theirs than his.

Their prey yielded not only food but a weapon for Travis. Instead of the
belt knife he had remembered having, he was now equipped with two. The
double horn had been easy to free from the shattered skull, and some
careful work with stones had broken off one prong at just the angle he
wanted. So now he had a short and a longer tool, defense. At least they
were better than the stone with which he had entered the hunt.

Nalik'ideyu pushed past him to lap daintily at the water. Then she sat
up on her haunches, watching Travis as he smoothed the horn with a
stone.

"A knife," he said to her, "this will be a knife. And--" he glanced up,
measuring the value of the wood represented by trees and bushes--"then a
bow. With a bow we shall hunt better."

The coyote yawned, her yellow eyes half closed, her whole pose one of
satisfaction and contentment.

"A knife," Travis repeated, "and a bow." He needed weapons; he had to
have them!

Why? His hand stopped scraping. Why? The toad-faced double horn had been
quick to attack, but Travis could have avoided it, and it had not hunted
him first. Why was he ridden by this fear that he must not be unarmed?

He dipped his hand into the pool of the spring and lifted the water to
cool his sweating face. The coyote moved, turned around in the grass,
crushing down the growth into a nest in which she curled up, head on
paws. But Travis sat back on his heels, his now idle hands hanging down
between his knees, and forced himself to the task of sorting out jumbled
memories.

This landscape was wrong--totally unlike what it should be--but it was
real. He had helped kill this alien creature. He had eaten its meat,
raw. Its horn lay within touch now. All that was real and unchangeable.
Which meant that the rest of it, that other desert world in which he had
wandered with his kind, ridden horses, raided invading men of another
race, that was not real--or else far, far removed from where he now sat.

Yet there had been no dividing line between those two worlds. One moment
he had been in the desert place, returning from a successful foray
against the Mexicans. Mexica