When morning came, Duncan and Sipar climbed the scarp, clambering over the boulders and the tons of soil and rock that covered their camping place. Following the gash cut by the slide, they clambered up the slope and finally reached the point of the slide's beginning. There they found the depression in which the poised slab of rock had rested and where the supporting soil had been dug away so that it could be started, with a push, down the slope above the campfire. And all about were the deeply sunken pug marks of the Cytha! IV Now it was more than just a hunt. It was knife against the throat, kill or be killed. Now there was no stopping, when before there might have been. It was no longer sport and there was no mercy. "And that's the way I like it," Duncan told himself. He rubbed his hand along the rifle barrel and saw the metallic glints shine in the noonday sun. One more shot, he prayed. Just give me one more shot at it. This time there will be no slip-up. This time there will be more than three sodden hunks of flesh and fur lying in the grass to mock me. He squinted his eyes against the heat shimmer rising from the river, watching Sipar hunkered beside the water's edge. The native rose to its feet and trotted back to him. "It crossed," said Sipar. "It walked out as far as it could go and it must have swum." "Are you sure? It might have waded out to make us think it crossed, then doubled back again." He stared at the purple-green of the trees across the river. Inside that forest, it would be hellish going. "We can look," said Sipar. "Good. You go downstream. I'll go up." An hour later, they were back. They had found no tracks. There seemed little doubt the Cytha had really crossed the river. They stood side by side, looking at the forest. "Mister, we have come far. You are brave to hunt the Cytha. You have no fear of death." "The fear of death," Duncan said, "is entirely infantile. And it's beside the point as well. I do not intend to die." They waded out into the stream. The bottom shelved gradually and they had to swim no more than a hundred yards or so. They reached the forest bank and threw themselves flat to rest. Duncan looked back the way that they had come. To the east, the escarpment was a dark-blue smudge against the pale-blue burnished sky. And two days back of that lay the farm and the _vua_ field, but they seemed much farther off than that. They were lost in time and distance; they belonged to another existence and another world. All his life, it seemed to him, had faded and become inconsequential and forgotten, as if this moment in his life were the only one that counted; as if all the minutes and the hours, all the breaths and heartbeats, wake and sleep, had pointed toward this certain hour upon this certain stream, with the rifle molded to his hand and the cool, calculated bloodlust of a killer riding in his brain. * * * * *