Each carried a light backpack of gifts and trade-goods, sleeping-bag, enough dried concentrated food to see him through a month's blizzard. Buckeye, who had never left the House of her birth, had a great fear of perils and delays in the Forest and had supplied their packs accordingly. Each wore a laser-beam gun; and Falk carried some extras—another pound or two of food; medicines, compass, a second gun, a change of clothing, a coil of rope; a little book given him two years ago by Zove—amounting in all to about fifteen pounds of stuff, his earthly possessions. Easy and tireless Metock loped on ahead, and ten yards or so behind he followed, and after him came Thurro. They went lightly, with little sound, and behind them the trees gathered motionless over the faint, leaf-strewn trail.

They would come to Ransifel on the third day. At evening of the second day they were in country different from that around Zove's House. The forest was more open, the ground broken. Gray glades lay along hillsides above brush-choked streams. They made camp in one of these open places, on a south-facing slope, for the north wind was blowing stronger with a hint of winter in it. Thurro brought armloads of dry wood while the other two cleared away the gray grass and piled up a rough hearth of stones. As they worked Metock said, "We crossed a divide this afternoon. The stream down there runs west. To the Inland River, finally."

Falk straightened up and looked westward, but the low hills rose up soon and the low sky closed down, leaving no distant view.

"Metock," he said, I've been thinking there's no point in my going on to Ransifel. I may as well be on my way. There seemed to be a trail leading west along the big stream we crossed this afternoon. I'll go back and follow it."

Metock glanced up; he did not mindspeak, but his thought was plain enough: Are you thinking of running back home?

Falk did use mindspeech for his reply: "No, damn it, I'm not!"