st to landmarks I
can give you...."

When he had finished he said, "That's the best I can do. You can't see
the red clay except when the sun is low in the southwest but I'm going
to build a monument on top of the hill to find it by."

"About you, Howard," Steve asked, "what are your chances?"

The wind was rising to a high moaning around the ledges of the granite
dike and the vein was already invisible under the snow.

"It doesn't look like they're very good," he answered. "You'll probably
be leader when you come back next spring--I told the council I wanted
that if anything happened to me. Keep things going the way I would have.
Now--I'll have to hurry to get the monument built in time."

"All right," Schroeder said. "So long, Howard ... good luck."

He climbed to the top of the hill and saw boulders there he could use to
build the monument. They were large--he might crush Tip against his
chest in picking them up--and he took off his jacket, to wrap it around
Tip and leave him lying on the ground.

He worked until he was panting for breath, the wind driving the snow
harder and harder against him until the cold seemed to have penetrated
to the bone. He worked until the monument was too high for his numb
hands to lift any more boulders to its top. By then it was tall enough
that it should serve its purpose.

He went back to look for Tip, the ground already four inches deep in
snow and the darkness almost complete.

"Tip," he called. "Tip--Tip----" He walked back and forth across the
hillside in the area where he thought he had left him, stumbling over
rocks buried in the snow and invisible in the darkness, calling against
the wind and thinking, _I can't leave him to die alone here._

Then, from a bulge he had not seen in the snow under him, there came a
frightened, lonely wail:

_"Tip cold--Tip cold----"_

He raked the snow off his jacket and unwrapped Tip, to put him inside
his shirt next to his bare skin. Tip's paws were like ice and he was
shivering violently, the first symptom of the pneumonia that killed
mockers so quickly.

Tip coughed, a wrenching, rattling little sound, and whimpered,
"Hurt--hurt----"

"I know," he said. "Your lungs hurt--damn it to hell, I wish I could
have let you go home with Steve."

He put on the cold jacket and went down the hill. There was nothing
with which he could make a fire--only the short half-green grass,
already buried under the snow. He turned south at the botto