Finally he got to his feet and headed along the pitted surface of the bridge. A sign creaked, jerking his ears forward. It was only half a sign, without a place name, but carrying an iron engraving of its population, now smeared over with weathered paint. King bristled toward it, smelled it cautiously, and was abruptly nosing behind it frantically. There was only the whisper of the ghost of an odor there, and it was too faint to stimulate his senses more than once. He clawed at it, whining, but the scent from his dreams refused to return. He began running again, leaping over gaps in the paving. One newly-fallen section was impassable, and he had to search his way across twelve-inch, rusty iron beams. He slipped twice, and had to scratch and fight his way back. At mid-point, with the limits of the small city spread out before him, he stopped to explode in a barking sound he hadn’t made in thirty years. Then he was plunging on again, until the bridge was behind and he was coursing through the wide, ruined streets at a full run. Twice he started on false trails through the shops and warehouses, but the third time something seemed to groove itself into his thoughts, like the feeling that led him back to the salmon run each year. It was weak and uncertain, as old memories fought against stronger habits, but it grew as he panted his way out of the heart of the ruined city. Glass fractured and clattered downward from one building, followed by a skull that shattered on the stones. King avoided the shower of fragments and redoubled his speed, his big body bent in arching leaps, and his ears flattened back against his head. He knew where he was, even before he swept through the last of the rooming house section and came to the edge of the rolling university campus. Then, for a moment, the dawning memory in his mind spun and twisted at the ruin the elements had made. But it was the lack of familiar smells that bothered him most. Even at the end, there had been the eternal odor of the chemistry laboratory, and now even that was gone. The big gate was open. His legs had begun to bunch for the leap and scramble over it, and the tension in them died slowly. He slowed to a trot, lifting his head in a double bark that rasped the unfamiliar muscles of his throat. A huge tree had fallen across the path, but a section had been cut away with an axe. Rotted chips sounded underfoot as King passed by. Then he was darting around one of the big redstone buildings, heading down the path that led to the back of the campus. There most of the great tree boles still stood, with even their nakedness too thick a screen for his eyes to penetrate. He charged through the rubble of sticks and rabbit bones that filled the path there and took a sudden left turn, to come to a skidding halt.