Hand grips, balance, sometimes a walk along a branch--he threaded towards the lake. Then he came to a gap. With hands laced into tendrils, Vye hunched to look down on a beaten ribbon of gray earth--a trail well used by the evidence of its pounded surface. That area had to be crossed on foot, but his passage through the brush below would leave traces. Only--there was no other way. Vye checked the lashings of his weapons again before leaping. Almost in the same instant his sandals hit the packed earth he was running. His palms skinned raw on rough bark as he somehow scrambled aloft once more. No more vines, but broad limbs shooting well out. He dropped from one to another-stopped for breath--listened. The dark gloom of the wood was broken by sunlight. He was at the final ring of trees. To get to the water he must descend again. A dead trunk extended over the water. If he could run out on that and lower the bulb, it could work. Eerie silence. No flying things, no tree dwelling reptiles or animals, no disturbance of any water creature on the unruffled surface of the lake. Yet the sensation of life, inimical life, lurking in the depths of the wood, under the water, bore in upon him. Vye made the light leap to the bole of the dead tree, balanced out on it over the water, moving slowly as the trunk settled a little under his weight. He hunkered down, brought out the first bulb tied fast to a blanket string. The water of the river had been brown, opaque. But here the liquid was not so cloudy. He could see snags of dead branches below its surface. And something else! Down in those turgid depths he made out a straight ridge running with a trueness of line which could not be nature's unassisted product. That ridge joined another in a squared corner. He leaned over, strained his eyes to follow through the murk the farther extent of those two ridges. Looked along both pointed protuberances aimed at the surfaces of the lake, like fangs in an open jaw. Down there was something--something artificially fashioned which might be the answer to all their questions. But to venture into the lake himself--he could not do it! If he could bring the Out-Hunter to his senses the other might find the solution to this puzzle. Vye filled his bulbs, working speedily, but still studying what he could see of the strange erection under the lake. He thought it was curiously free of silt, and its color, as far as he could distinguish, allowing for the dark hue of the water, was light gray--perhaps even white. He lowered his last bulb. Down in the bleached forest of dead branches, well to one side of the mysterious walls, there was movement, a slow rolling of a shadow so hidden by a stirring of bottom mud that Vye could not make out its true form. But it was rising to the bulb. Vye hated to lose a single precious drop. Once he might have the luck to make this journey unmolested, a second time the odds could be too high.