ke the attempt at all. He darted for the first stand of bush
downhill.

As the brooding silence of the valley continued, he reached the edge
of the wood unhindered, intent on his mission with a concentration
which shut out everything save his need and the manner of satisfying
it.

He squatted in the bush, eyeing the length of woodland ahead. Then he
tried the only action he had been able to think out. That beast Hume
had killed had been too heavy to swing up in trees. But Vye's own
weight now did not prohibit that form of travel.

With spear and ray tube firmly attached to him, Vye climbed into the
first tree. A slim chance--but his only defense against a possible
ambush. A wild outward swing brought him, heart-thudding, to the next
set of limbs. Then he had a piece of luck, a looped vine tied together
a whole group of branches from one treetop to the next.

Hand grips, balance, sometimes a walk along a branch--he threaded
towards the lake. Then he came to a gap. With hands laced into
tendrils, Vye hunched to look down on a beaten ribbon of gray earth--a
trail well used by the evidence of its pounded surface.

That area had to be crossed on foot, but his passage through the brush
below would leave traces. Only--there was no other way. Vye checked
the lashings of his weapons again before leaping. Almost in the same
instant his sandals hit the packed earth he was running. His palms
skinned raw on rough bark as he somehow scrambled aloft once more.

No more vines, but broad limbs shooting well out. He dropped from one
to another-stopped for breath--listened.

The dark gloom of the wood was broken by sunlight. He was at the final
ring of trees. To get to the water he must descend again. A dead trunk
extended over the water. If he could run out on that and lower the
bulb, it could work.

Eerie silence. No flying things, no tree dwelling reptiles or animals,
no disturbance of any water creature on the unruffled surface of the
lake. Yet the sensation of life, inimical life, lurking in the depths
of the wood, under the water, bore in upon him.

Vye made the light leap to the bole of the dead tree, balanced out on
it over the water, moving slowly as the trunk settled a little under
his weight. He hunkered down, brought out the first bulb tied fast to
a blanket string.

The water of the river had been brown, opaque. But here the liquid was
not so cloudy. He could see snags of dead branches below its surface.

And so