of hidden birds andsomething far away began to make a noise that sounded like an emptybarrel falling slowly down a stairway.
What little coolness the night had brought dissipated swiftly and theheat clamped down, a breathless, relentless heat that quivered in theair.
Circling, Duncan picked up the Cytha trail not more than a hundredyards from camp.
The beast had been traveling fast. The pug marks were deeply sunk andwidely spaced. Duncan followed as rapidly as he dared. It was atemptation to follow at a run, to match the Cytha's speed, for thetrail was plain and fresh and it fairly beckoned.
And that was wrong, Duncan told himself. It was too fresh, tooplain--almost as if the animal had gone to endless trouble so that thehuman could not miss the trail.
He stopped his trailing and crouched beside a tree and studied thetracks ahead. His hands were too tense upon the gun, his body keyedtoo high and fine. He forced himself to take slow, deep breaths. Hehad to calm himself. He had to loosen up.
He studied the tracks ahead--four bunched pug marks, then a long leapinterval, then four more bunched tracks, and between the sets of marksthe forest floor was innocent and smooth.
Too smooth, perhaps. Especially the third one from him. Too smooth andsomehow artificial, as if someone had patted it with gentle hands tomake it unsuspicious.
Duncan sucked his breath in slowly.
Trap?
Or was his imagination playing tricks on him?
And if it were a trap, he would have fallen into it if he had kept onfollowing as he had started out.
Now there was something else, a strange uneasiness, and he stirreduncomfortably, casting frantically for some clue to what it was.
* * * * *
He rose and stepped out from the tree, with the gun at ready. What aperfect place to set a trap, he thought. One would be looking at thepug marks, never at the space between them, for the space betweenwould be neutral ground, safe to stride out upon.
Oh, clever Cytha, he said to himself. Oh, clever, clever Cytha!
And now he knew what the other trouble was--the great uneasiness. Itwas the sense of being watched.
Somewhere up ahead, the Cytha was crouched, watching andwaiting--anxious or exultant, maybe even with laughter rumbling in itsthroat.
He walked slowly forward until he reached the third set of tracks andhe saw that he had been right. The little area ahead was smoother thanit should be.
"Cytha!" he called.
His voice was far louder than he had meant it to be and he stoodastonished and a bit abashed.
Then he realized why it was so loud.
It was the only sound there was!
The forest suddenly had fallen silent. The insects and birds werequiet and the thing in the distance had quit falling down the stairs.Even the leaves were silent. There was no rustle in them and they hunglimp upon their stems.
There was a feeling of doom and the green light had changed to acopper light and everything was still.
And the light was _copper_!
Duncan spun around in panic. There was no place for him to hide.
Before he could take another step, the _skun_ came and the windsrushed out of nowhere. The air was clogged with flying leaves anddebris. Trees snapped and popped and tumbled in the air.
The wind hurled Duncan to his knees, and as he fought to regain hisfeet, he remembered, in a blinding flash of total recall, how it hadlooked from atop the escarpment--the boiling fury of the winds and themad swirling of the coppery mist and how the trees had whipped inwhirlpool fashion.
He came half erect and stumbled, clawing at the ground in an attemptto get up again, while inside his brain an insistent, clicking voicecried out for him to run, and somewhere another voice said to lie flatupon the ground, to dig in as best he could.
Something struck him from behind and he went down, pinned flat, withhis rifle wedged beneath him. He cracked his head upon the ground andthe world whirled sickeningly and plastered his face with a handful ofmud and tattered leaves.
He tried to crawl and couldn't, for something had grabbed him by theankle and was hanging on.
* * * * *
With a frantic hand, he clawed the mess out of his eyes, spat it fromhis mouth.
Across the spinning ground, something black and angular tumbledrapidly. It was coming straight toward him and he saw it was the Cythaand that in another second it would be on top of him.
He threw up an arm across his face, with the elbow crooked, to takethe impact of the wind-blown Cytha and to ward it off.
But it never reached him. Less than a yard away, the ground opened upto take the Cytha and it was no longer there.
Suddenly the wind cut off and the leaves once more hung motionless andthe heat clamped down again and that was the end of it. The _skun_ hadcome and struck and gone.
Minutes, Duncan wondered, or perhaps no more than seconds. But inthose seconds, the forest had been flattened and the trees lay inshattered heaps.
He raised himself on an elbow and looked to see what was the matterwith his foot and he saw that a fallen tree had trapped his footbeneath it.
He tugged a few times experimentally. It was no use. Two close-setlimbs, branching almost at right angles from the hole, had been drivendeep into the ground and his foot, he saw, had been caught at theankle in the fork of the buried branches.
The foot didn't hurt--not yet. It didn't seem to be there at all. Hetried wiggling his toes and felt none.
He wiped the sweat off his face with a shirt sleeve and fought toforce down the panic that was rising in him. Getting panicky was theworst thing a man could do in a spot like this. The thing to do was totake stock of the situation, figure out the best approach, then goahead and try it.
The tree looked heavy, but perhaps he could handle it if he had to,although there was the danger that if he shifted it, the bole mightsettle more solidly and crush his foot beneath it. At the moment, thetwo heavy branches, thrust into the ground on either side of hisankle, were holding most of the tree's weight off his foot.
The best thing to do, he decided, was to dig the ground away beneathhis foot until he could pull it out.
He twisted around and started digging with the fingers of one hand.Beneath the thin covering of humus, he struck a solid surface and hisfingers slid along it.
With mounting alarm, he explored the ground, scratching at the humus.There was nothing but rock--some long-buried boulder, the top of whichlay just beneath the ground.
His foot was trapped beneath a heavy tree and a massive boulder, heldsecurely in place by forked branches that had forced their splinteringway down along the boulder's sides.
* * * * *
He lay back, propped on an elbow. It was evident that he could donothing about the buried boulder. If he was going to do anything, hisproblem was the tree.
To move the tree, he would need a lever and he had a good, stout leverin his rifle. It would be a shame, he thought a little wryly, to use agun for such a purpose, but he had no choice.
He worked for an hour and it was no good. Even with the rifle as apry, he could not budge the tree.
He lay back, defeated, breathing hard, wringing wet with perspiration.
He grimaced at the sky.
All right, Cytha, he thought, you won out in the end. But it took a_skun_ to do it. With all your tricks, you couldn't do the jobuntil....
Then he remembered.
He sat up hurriedly.
"Cytha!" he called.
The Cytha had fallen into a hole that had opened in the ground. Thehole was less than an arm's length away from him, with a little debrisaround its edges still trickling into it.
Duncan stretched out his body, lying flat upon the ground, and lookedinto the hole. There, at the bottom of it, was the Cytha.
It was the first time he'd gotten a good look at the Cytha and it wasa crazily put-together thing. It seemed to have nothing functional
about it and it looked more like a heap of something, just thrown onthe ground, than it did an animal.
The hole, he saw, was more than an ordinary hole. It was a pit andvery cleverly constructed. The mouth was about four feet in diameterand it widened to roughly twice that at the bottom. It was, ingeneral, bottle-shaped, with an incurving shoulder at the top so thatanything that fell in could not climb out. Anything falling into thatpit was in to stay.
This, Duncan knew, was what had lain beneath that too-smooth intervalbetween the two sets of Cytha tracks. The Cytha had worked all nightto dig it, then had carried away the dirt dug out of the pit and hadbuilt a flimsy camouflage cover over it. Then it had gone back andmade the trail that was so loud and clear, so easy to make out andfollow. And having done all that, having labored hard and stealthily,the Cytha had settled down to watch, to make sure the following humanhad fallen in the pit.
* * * * *
"Hi, pal," said Duncan. "How are you making out?"
The Cytha did not answer.
"Classy pit," said Duncan. "Do you always den up in luxury like this?"
But the
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