"What a damned place this is!" Boyce stressed. "It is so ungodly." "It may be but it's the legacy given to the world by the ancient men!" Their attention was diverted when they heard a gagging roar and grunt. With it there was a loud shriek, like a scream, and they looked at each other with puzzled and surprised eyes. "That did not sound like a scream that a bird would make!" Boyce suggested as he got on his knees, drawing his weapon and trying to follow the unusual sound. It came again and was getting nearer and more frequent. The, there it was. To their utter dismay, there was a woman running out of the thicket of brush some twenty meters away. She constantly turned to look behind her. The bushes waved and buckled as if a herd of elephants were breaking through in the same direction that the woman was running. Lloyd hollered out to her, calling her to run towards the cliff where they sat, and then they saw what was running after her. It was a wild pig the size of a horse. It advanced more quickly on the woman, now that she was in the open. "Drop to the ground!" Boyce yelled at her several times until she finally did it. Before the pig came upon her in its rampant and hostile charge, Boyce fired a laser at it split the pig's skull in two. Lloyd quickly climbed down from the ledge and ran to her, picked her up and ran towards the cliff just as the pig fell from its momentum. He guided her into the notches in the cliff face and push her up along the way. At the ledge Boyce took hold of her arms and pulled her up. She looked at his face for a moment then lost consciousness. Lloyd and Boyce were ready to leave before this strange woman happened along. Now they felt a duty to stay with her until she came to. They wrapped her in Lloyd's blanket after touching her skin and finding that it was ice-cold. Lloyd looked at the woman and made a comment to Boyce about her beauty and strangely frail-looking quality. She wasn't very tall yet her build was slim and firm. Her hair was very long and dark, shaded with copper highlights and her shut eyes were oblong and appeared to be larger and slightly slanting. Her whole face had a serious beauty about it, the patches of dirt, here and there, made little difference to its overall appeal. Lloyd was taken with her. He didn't know whether it was because of her beauty or because she was in the middle of this most naturally hostile place on the northern continent. Nevertheless, he found it very hard not to look at her. Boyce had found her extremely attractive, also, but the idea of this woman's presence in the forest made him wonder about her. "She is beautiful!" Lloyd began. "I wonder who she is; how she came to be here?" "I question her being here, at all. She's a day's journey from both the river and the end of this forest. How has she survived here?" Boyce was becoming nervous about her and he disliked her due to his mistrust.