les of his clenched fist,
attempting to bend that discovery into evidence. Why did he know at
once that that thin, eerie wailing was the flock call of a
leather-winged, feathered tree dweller, and that a coughing grunt from
downstream was just a noise?

"Rynch Brodie--Largo Drift--Tait." He tasted the blood his teeth drew
from his own skin as he recited that formula. Then he scrambled up.
His feet tangled in the net, and he went down again, his head cracking
on a protruding root.

Nothing tangible reached him in that brush shelter. What did venture
out of hiding to investigate was a substance none of his species could
have named. It was neither body, nor mind--perhaps it was closest to
alien emotion.

Making contact stealthily, but with confidence, it explored after its
own fashion. Then, puzzled, it withdrew to report. And since that to
which it reported was governed by a set pattern which had not been
altered for eons, its only answer was a basic command reaffirmed.
Again it made contact, strove to carry out that order fruitlessly.
Where it should have found easy passage, a clear channel to carry
influence to the sleeper's brain, it found a jumble of impressions,
interwoven until they made a protective barrier.

The invader strove to find some pattern, or meaning--withdrew baffled.
But its invasion, as ghostly as that had been, loosened a knot here,
cleared a passage there.

Rynch awoke at dawn, slowly, dazedly, sorting out sounds, smells,
thoughts. There was a room, a man, trouble and fear, then there was
he, Rynch Brodie, who had lived in this wilderness on an unmapped
frontier world for the passage of many seasons. That world was about
him now, he could feel its winds, hear its sounds, taste, smell. It
was not a dream--the other was the dream. It had to be!

Prove it. Find the L-B, retrace the trail of yesterday past the point
of the fall which had started all this. Right there was the slope down
which he must have tumbled. Above, he would find the den he had been
exploring when the accident had occurred.

Only--he did not find it. His mind had produced a detailed picture of
that rounded depression, at the bottom of which the strong-jaw lurked.
But when he reached the crown of the bluff, nowhere did he sight the
mounded earth of the pit's rim. He searched carefully for a good
length, both north and south. No den--no trace of one. Yet his memory
told him that there had been one here yesterday.

Had he fal