The snow there was trampled as if through the night a Rugby team had had a go of it, and lying there, used up, blackened with smudge, was a flambeau of sorts--a length of wood with charred brush lashed to it. O'Hara ran his finger through the soot. It left a smear of oil. Petroleum! Life for the motors of his craft. And somewhere near--his search had purpose now. "I don't know what the devil I really thought I'd do with fuel," said O'Hara. "Fly around in that infernal corridor, I suppose, like a bullfinch in an aviary, free as all getout until I wanted to go somewhere beyond it. The truth is, all that seemed to matter was the chance of taking off again. That's what the Patrol does to you--puts pinfeathers on your brains. I wanted that fuel. And bad." The trail led backward through the forest, a series of lines converging as if the individuals of a herd had searched in scattered formation toward this one meadow on the top of this one mountain, yet a preponderance of feet had trampled south by east, and O'Hara followed that line, keeping his jacket open for quick access to his automatic and using his ice ax when he needed it to chop through underbrush. "You've seen a gull walk, haven't you? He's out of his natural element and he waddles--fine enough flying, and very good in the water, but he walks--well, like a gull. That was how I felt on foot, scrabbling through that forest," said O'Hara. "Most of it was downhill work, which helped, and presently the brush thinned out and the trees got larger and fewer and I was doing a passing fair job of it, following that trail until it was well after noonday, when I leaned against a ledge of granite for a breath." But he did not quite get it. "I gulped at it--and then I gave it up entirely. For crouching on the ledge above was an enormous cat. When I say enormous, don't imagine a lion. The king of beasts is a stinking coward, but this creature stalking me was making a little game of it, a kind of homicidal little game--its eyes pale yellow with insanity and its two fangs a greenish yellow and larger than the tusks of a walrus. Had it leaped, I would not have known it, not for more than the instant it takes a severed jugular to spurt your life's blood out. As I say, I did not get that breath--I fired, quite sillily without aiming, but the bullet splattered through one of those yellow eyes into its brain." And while it threshed, O'Hara walked less like a gull. But he was not altogether getting away from the creature. The sight of those tusklike fangs kept coming back to him, insistently, hammering away at some obscure little wrinkle of his memory, until at last the two words formed and were upon his lips, "Saber-tooth!" It was absurd. It could not possibly be that. And yet it was--the cat had been a saber-tooth, or surely like the skeletons of those long-vanished, blood-imbibing killers of the North American continent.