He saw something hardly a hundred yards from where he had hidden during the night. The dead beetle lay there, crumpled and limp. Burl eyed it speculatively. Then he saw something that filled him with elation. The last crash of the beetle to the ground had driven his spear deeply between the joints of the corselet and neck. Even if the red dust had not finished the creature, the spear-point would have ended its life. He was thrilled once more by his superlative greatness. He made due note that he was a mighty slayer. He took the antennae as proof of his valor and hacked off a great barb-edged leg for meat. And then he remembered that he did not know how to find his fellow-tribesmen. He had no idea which way to go. Even a civilized man would have been at a loss, though he would have hunted for an elevation from which to look for the cliff hiding-place of the tribe. But Burl had not yet progressed so far. His wild ride of the night before had been at random, and the chase after the wounded beetle no less dictated by chance. There was no answer. He set off anxiously, searching everywhere. But he had to be alert for all the dangers of an inimical world while keeping, at the same time, an extremely sharp eye out for bursting red puffballs. At the end of an hour he thought he saw familiar things. Then he recognized the spot. He had come back to the dead beetle. It was already the center of a mass of small black bodies which pulled and hacked at the tough armor, gnawing out great lumps of flesh to be carried to the nearest ant-city. Burl set off again, very carefully avoiding any place that he recognized as having been seen that morning. Sometimes he walked through mushroom-thickets--dangerous places to be in--and sometimes over relatively clear ground colored exotically with varicolored fungi. More than once he saw the clouds of red stuff spurting in the distance. Deep anxiety filled him. He had no idea that there were such things as points of the compass. He knew only that he needed desperately to find his tribesfolk again. They, of course, had given him up for dead. He had vanished in the night. Old Tama complained of him shrilly. The night, to them, meant death. Jon quaked watchfully all through it. When Burl did not come to the feast of mushroom that Jon and Dor had brought back, they sought him. They even called timidly into the darkness. They heard the throbbing of huge wings as a great creature rose desperately into the sky, but they did not associate that sound with Burl. If they had, they would have been instantly certain of his fate.