Analea still walked beside him, but her carbine was slung, and she carried three spears with chipped flint heads; one heavy weapon, to be thrown by hand or used for stabbing, and two light javelins to be thrown with the aid of the hooked throwing-stick Glav had invented.  Beside her trudged a four-year old boy, hers and Dard’s, and on her back, in a fur-lined net bag, she carried their six-month-old baby.

In the rear, Glav still kept his place with the other big-game gun, and Olva walked beside him with carbine and spears; in front of them, their three-year-old daughter toddled.  Between vanguard and rearguard, the rest of the party walked:  Varnis, carrying her baby on her back, and Dorita, carrying a baby and leading two other children.  The baby on her back had cost the life of Kyna in childbirth; one of the others had been left motherless when Eldra had been killed by the Hairy People.

* * * * *

That had been two years ago, in the winter when they had used one of their two demolition-bombs to blast open a cavern in the mountains.  It had been a hard winter; two children had died, then—­Kyna’s firstborn, and the little son of Kalvar Dard and Dorita.  It had been their first encounter with the Hairy People, too.

Eldra had gone outside the cave with one of the skin water-bags, to fill it at the spring.  It had been after sunset, but she had carried her pistol, and no one had thought of danger until they heard the two quick shots, and the scream.  They had all rushed out, to find four shaggy, manlike things tearing at Eldra with hands and teeth, another lying dead, and a sixth huddled at one side, clutching its abdomen and whimpering.  There had been a quick flurry of shots that had felled all four of the assailants, and Seldar Glav had finished the wounded creature with his dagger, but Eldra was dead.  They had built a cairn of stones over her body, as they had done over the bodies of the two children killed by the cold.  But, after an examination to see what sort of things they were, they had tumbled the bodies of the Hairy People over the cliff.  These had been too bestial to bury as befitted human dead, but too manlike to skin and eat as game.

Since then, they had often found traces of the Hairy People, and when they met with them, they killed them without mercy.  These were great shambling parodies of humanity, long-armed, short-legged, twice as heavy as men, with close-set reddish eyes and heavy bone-crushing jaws.  They may have been incredibly debased humans, or perhaps beasts on the very threshold of manhood.  From what he had seen of conditions on this planet, Kalvar Dard suspected the latter to be the case.  In a million or so years, they might evolve into something like humanity.  Already, the Hairy ones had learned the use of fire, and of chipped crude stone implements—­mostly heavy triangular choppers to be used in the hand, without helves.