Now he could sense the _Gruoon's_ naked, yellow-scaled claws outstretched, its toothed beak yawing, and its red-disked eyes shining with that insatiable blood-thirst that was the scourge of this world. The scourge of all but himself. He tensed the full length of his mighty corded body, his twelve flippers digging into the glowing mud, his gigantic corded tail curled in feral silence around into a taut S that could spring outward in a blinding explosion of power. She was experiencing great fear, but still not as much as she should. This surprised him. Now that he knew how completely helpless and alien she was on this world of his, how frail and delicate she was, and how she belonged on a much different sphere than this one. She had no conception that the _Gruoon_ was even now falling down upon her like a comet. That those poisonous claws would wrap about her creamy body and rip her to shreds and carry her away into the smoking peaks. She was ignorant of all the countless dangers surrounding her. Fifty _kimm_ away, hardly more than the length of his own body, was the SHIP which she was trying to find. But she had not the dimmest concept of where it was. Such appalling lack of basically protective intuition was incomprehensible to him. She knew nothing of the _Vreed_, and its painless bite which bloated a living organism rapidly until it burst. And the venomous stinging of the _Kristons_ that paralzyed to a slow unmoving death. Or the semi-organic _Trumask_ tree that waited for her approach even now, immobile, without any visible sign to its victims that its crimson appendages could suddenly whip into action to trap them, dragging them into its trunk that opened to reveal a slightly pulsating cavern full of half-devoured forms. These were only a few of an endless horde of huge and hideous things, yet she suspected none of the things waiting in the mists. She could only believe what she saw through her beautiful eyes. And the mist was thick. Suddenly the taut S of his body unleashed itself, whipping straight upward in an unbending line. His sharp snout speared up through the swirling vapor until he was balanced momentarily on the tip of his stiffened tail. Then, at the apex of his spring, his three-jawed mouth unhinged, gaped and crunched shut on the _Gruoon_. The vapor was whipped into fretful whirls. The girl sank down, her eyes searching upward, but blindly through the gloom. He sank down once more on his scaled belly, wriggled deeper in the mud. He dropped the mangled leathery blob that had been a _Gruoon_. Then he turned his eyes once more on the bit of strange beauty which he had preserved a little while longer for his aesthetic pleasure. * * * * *