th on the
ground below.

Nor did Tharn protest these activities or urge him to greater caution.
The youth must learn from experience what could and could not be done.
He gloried in Trakor's small triumphs and comforted him in his failures,
and always he was careful not to say or do anything that would weaken
the boy's mounting confidence.

* * * * *

When Tharn was satisfied the boy was reasonably at home among the trees,
by night or by day, the second phase of his education was undertaken. He
taught him to follow an animal's spoor along the dust of a game trail,
he showed him how not only to classify each into its proper category but
schooled him in such fine distinctions as judging an animal's height,
weight and age from imprints left by its feet. Luckily Trakor was
endowed with eyes and ears beyond the normal in keenness, and it was not
long until he was able to give an excellent account of himself in
woodcraft.

And daily his strength was increasing under the unaccustomed tasks
imposed on his muscles. Swinging by the hands through mile after mile of
branches molded biceps and back muscles into bands of steel and endowed
his fingers with a vise-like grip. His body, already deeply tanned,
became burned to a dusky hue and he began to fill out into a specimen of
perfect manhood.

If Tharn chafed at the delay in his reunion with Dylara he did not
display it and he continued the boy's education as though he had a
lifetime to put into doing so. But Trakor knew what all this was costing
the other, and while he never mentioned it, the determination grew to
make it up to the cave lord. There was a bond between them now, based on
mutual respect and admiration, plus a hero-worshiping desire on Trakor's
part to become exactly like Tharn himself.

Exactly half a moon from the day Tharn had snatched Trakor from under
the noses of Gerdak's warriors, the boy made his first kill--a fat buck
that had come down to a water hole to drink. He had dropped upon its
back from the lower branches of a tree, as Tharn had taught him, and a
knife thrust into its heart had brought it down.

They sat side by side among the branches of a tree, gorging themselves
on strips of raw flesh hacked from the side of Trakor's kill, while
below them a pack of Jackals quarreled over the buck's remains. Sunset
was only minutes away and already dusk was seeping into the forest
aisles.

Trakor was full of plans for the mo