resee a time when the past and the present might well split them
apart--fatally.

"Devil or _ga-n_." A man with a quiet face, rather deeply sunken eyes,
spoke for the first time. "We are in two minds because of this Redax, so
let us not do anything in haste. Back in the desert world of the People
I have seen the _mba'a_, and he was very clever. With the badger he went
hunting, and when the badger had dug up the rat's nest, so did the
_mba'a_ wait on the other side of the thorny bush and catch those who
would escape that way. Between him and the badger there was no war.
These two who sit over yonder now--they are also hunters and they seem
friendly to us. In a strange place a man needs all the help he can find.
Let us not call names out of old tales, which may mean nothing in fact."

"Buck speaks straightly," Jil-Lee agreed. "We seek a camp which can be
defended. For perhaps there are men here whose hunting territory we have
invaded, though we have not yet seen them. We are a people small in
number and alone. Let us walk softly on trails which are strange to our
feet."

Inwardly Travis sighed in relief. Buck, Jil-Lee ... for the moment their
sensible words appeared to swing the opinions of the party. If either of
them could be established as _haldzil_, or clan leader, they would all
be safer. He himself had no aspirations in that direction and dared not
push too hard. It had been his initial urging which had brought them as
volunteers into the project. Now he was doubly suspect, and especially
by those who thought as Deklay, he was considered too alien to their old
ways.

So far their protests had been fewer than he anticipated. Although
brothers and sisters had followed each other into the team after the
immemorial desire of Apaches to cling to family ties, they were not a
true clan with solidity of that to back them, but representatives of
half a dozen.

Basically, back on Terra, they had all been among the most progressive
of their people--progressive, that is, in the white man's sense of the
word. Travis had a fleeting recognition of his now oblique way of
thinking. He, too, had been marked by the Redax. They had all been
educated in the modern fashion and all possessed a spirit of adventure
which marked them over their fellows. They had volunteered for the team
and successfully passed the tests to weed out the temperamentally unfit
or fainthearted. But all that was before Redax....

Why had they been submitte