ried the hand-axe, fitted with a
long helve, and a spear with a steel head that had been worked painfully
from the receiver of a useless carbine. He still had his pistol, with
eight cartridges in the magazine, and his dagger, and the bomb-bag,
containing the big demolition-bomb and one grenade. The last shred of
clothing from the ship was gone, now; he was clad in a sleeveless tunic
of skin and horsehide buskins.

Analea no longer walked beside him; eight years before, she had broken
her back in a fall. It had been impossible to move her, and she stabbed
herself with her dagger to save a cartridge. Seldar Glav had broken
through the ice while crossing a river, and had lost his rifle; the next
day he died of the chill he had taken. Olva had been killed by the Hairy
People, the night they had attacked the camp, when Varnis' child had
been killed.

They had beaten off that attack, shot or speared ten of the huge
sub-men, and the next morning they buried their dead after their custom,
under cairns of stone. Varnis had watched the burial of her child with
blank, uncomprehending eyes, then she had turned to Kalvar Dard and said
something that had horrified him more than any wild outburst of grief
could have.

"Come on, Dard; what are we doing this for? You promised you'd take us
to Tareesh, where we'd have good houses, and machines, and all sorts of
lovely things to eat and wear. I don't like this place, Dard; I want to
go to Tareesh."

From that day on, she had wandered in merciful darkness. She had not
been idiotic, or raving mad; she had just escaped from a reality that
she could no longer bear.

Varnis, lost in her dream-world, and Dorita, hard-faced and haggard,
were the only ones left, beside Kalvar Dard, of the original eight. But
the band had grown, meanwhile, to more than fifteen. In the rear, in
Seldar Glav's old place, the son of Kalvar Dard and Analea walked. Like
his father, he wore a pistol, for which he had six rounds, and a dagger,
and in his hand he carried a stone-headed killing-maul with a three-foot
handle which he had made for himself. The woman who walked beside him
and carried his spears was the daughter of Glav and Olva; in a net-bag
on her back she carried their infant child. The first Tareeshan born of
Tareeshan parents; Kalvar Dard often looked at his little grandchild
during nights in camp and days on the trail, seeing, in that tiny
fur-swaddled morsel of humanity, the meaning and purpose of