And they were so helpless.  Six adults, burdened with seven little children, all of them requiring momently care and watchfulness.  If the cartridges could be made to last until they were old enough to fend for themselves....  If they could avoid collisions with the Hairy People....  Some day, they would be numerous enough for effective mutual protection and support; some day, the ratio of helpless children to able adults would redress itself.  Until then, all that they could do would be to survive; day after day, they must follow the game-herds.

4

For twenty years, now, they had been following the game.  Winters had come, with driving snow, forcing horses and deer into the woods, and the little band of humans to the protection of mountain caves.  Springtime followed, with fresh grass on the plains and plenty of meat for the people of Kalvar Dard.  Autumns followed summers, with fire-hunts, and the smoking and curing of meat and hides.  Winters followed autumns, and springtimes came again, and thus until the twentieth year after the landing of the rocket-boat.

Kalvar Dard still walked in the lead, his hair and beard flecked with gray, but he no longer carried the heavy rifle; the last cartridge for that had been fired long ago.  He carried the hand-axe, fitted with a long helve, and a spear with a steel head that had been worked painfully from the receiver of a useless carbine.  He still had his pistol, with eight cartridges in the magazine, and his dagger, and the bomb-bag, containing the big demolition-bomb and one grenade.  The last shred of clothing from the ship was gone, now; he was clad in a sleeveless tunic of skin and horsehide buskins.

Analea no longer walked beside him; eight years before, she had broken her back in a fall.  It had been impossible to move her, and she stabbed herself with her dagger to save a cartridge.  Seldar Glav had broken through the ice while crossing a river, and had lost his rifle; the next day he died of the chill he had taken.  Olva had been killed by the Hairy People, the night they had attacked the camp, when Varnis’ child had been killed.

They had beaten off that attack, shot or speared ten of the huge sub-men, and the next morning they buried their dead after their custom, under cairns of stone.  Varnis had watched the burial of her child with blank, uncomprehending eyes, then she had turned to Kalvar Dard and said something that had horrified him more than any wild outburst of grief could have.

“Come on, Dard; what are we doing this for?  You promised you’d take us to Tareesh, where we’d have good houses, and machines, and all sorts of lovely things to eat and wear.  I don’t like this place, Dard; I want to go to Tareesh.”

From that day on, she had wandered in merciful darkness.  She had not been idiotic, or raving mad; she had just escaped from a reality that she could no longer bear.