He awoke bolt upright with his automatic pointing. Wind? Of course. He repeated the thought as he circled the hill on the double. A chip of damp leaves, dark side up with alien things dragging their larvae from the sun, down the slope another, he pursued scars in the leaves over the hill, down, lost the trail in the dry watercourse, zig-zagging, circling like a hound dog, found it again. Ran. His leg muscles were soft from months without gravity. Steep hills. Rollercoasters. Winded. Resting, listening to his heart, listening, smiling: the mouse was not the largest fauna in his private world. Doubtless the thing that ran like a man was hills and valleys ahead, a world to hide in. As he trudged back to the shed he was not afraid, his heart was thumping, a-hunting we will go. He was listening and watching the hills while he strung the electric fence to keep out the mice. He was listening while he cleaned out a room in the old supply shed. He listened in his sleep, even after he had stretched alarm trip wires criss cross beneath the leaves and planted nooses with the sliding catch deer poachers use. Although he did not expect to hold the thing, since it surely would have more intelligence than a deer, he might get a look at it, a flick of time in which he could decide whether to shoot. The snares worked as he was sometimes to think afterward too well. The afternoon he charged into a world of shrieks and crashing leaves and saw a bronzed, hair-whirling fury, her leaf-clotted mane glinted blue in the sunlight, straining from the humming wire with the self-destroying terror of a filly trapped in a cattle guard, he stared, then ran for the wire snips. When he cautiously approached he saw the wire had bitten deep into her ankle. As she squawled, she was beating the leaves with blood. It would be many afternoons before she would run again, if ever. If he loosed this lone thing now, she would die. Once, on Mars, he shot a sand lizard that wriggled into a crevasse and would take a long time to die. To him, although it must be waiting in the darkness with yawning jaws, there was nothing for him to do but inch down and finish the mess he had begun. So he went back to his room for a blanket. Holding it open before him, he edged toward the snarling, drooling animal that backed away along the circle of its tether, leaving blood and liquid on the leaves. It stunk, it made him gag from excitement and the rank odor of its sweat and hate. He wanted to run and never come back, for he could not finish it like a sand lizard, it was going to be snarling and watching until the _Doric_ rescued him, took it away, and that would be six months! * * * * *