the ration of fruit and
vegetable foods and were given, alone, to those not yet sick. Then came
the period of waiting; of hoping that it was all not too late and too
little.

A noticeable change for the better began on the second day. A week went
by and the sick were slowly, steadily, improving. The not-quite-sick
were already back to normal health. There was no longer any doubt: the
Ragnarok herbs would prevent a recurrence of the disease.

It was, Lake thought, all so simple once you knew what to do. Hundreds
had died, Chiara among them, because they did not have a common herb
that grew at a slightly higher elevation. Not a single life would have
been lost if he could have looked a week into the future and had the
herbs found and taken to the caves that much sooner.

But the disease had given no warning of its coming. Nothing, on
Ragnarok, ever seemed to give warning before it killed.

Another week went by and hunters began to trickle in, gaunt and
exhausted, to report all the game going north up the plateau and not a
single creature left below. They were the ones who had tried and failed
to withstand the high elevation of the plateau. Only two out of three
hunters returned among those who had challenged the plateau. They had
tried, all of them, to the best of their ability and the limits of their
endurance.

The blue star was by then a small sun and the yellow sun blazed hotter
each day. Grass began to brown and wither on the hillsides as the days
went by and Lake knew summer was very near. The last hunting party, but
for Craig's and Schroeder's, returned. They had very little meat but
they brought with them a large quantity of something almost as
important: salt.

They had found a deposit of it in an almost inaccessible region of
cliffs and canyons. "Not even the woods goats can get in there,"
Stevens, the leader of that party, said. "If the salt was in an
accessible place there would have been a salt lick there and goats in
plenty."

"If woods goats care for salt the way Earth animals do," Lake said.
"When fall comes we'll make a salt lick and find out."

Two more weeks went by and Craig and Schroeder returned with their
surviving hunters. They had followed the game to the eastern end of the
snow-capped mountain range but there the migration had drawn away from
them, traveling farther each day than they could travel. They had almost
waited too long before turning back: the grass at the southern end of
th