"Aah, aah, aah, man, aah," the creature said, snuffling.

Falk's tense muscles jumped, and his hand tightened on the grip of his laser-pistol. He did not shoot. A wounded boar was hideously quick and dangerous. He crouched there absolutely still.

"Man, man," said the wild pig, the voice thick and flat from the scarred snout, "think to me. Think to me. Words are hard for me."

Falk's hand on the pistol shook now. Suddenly he spoke aloud: "Don't speak, then. I will not mindspeak. Go on, go your pig's way."

"Aah, aah, man, bespeak me!"

"Go or I will shoot." Falk stood up, his gun pointing steadily. The little bright hog-eyes watched the gun.

"It is wrong to take life," said the pig.

Falk had got his wits back and this time made no answer, sure that the beast understood no words. He moved the gun a little, recentered its aim, and said, "Go!" The boar dropped its head, hesitated. Then with incredible swiftness, as if released by a cord breaking, it turned and ran the way it had come.

Falk stood still a while, and when he turned and went on he kept his gun ready in his hand. His hand shook again, a little. There were old tales of beasts that spoke, but the people of Zove's House had thought them only tales. He felt a brief nausea and an equally brief wish to laugh out loud. "Parth," he whispered, for he had to talk to somebody, "I just had a lesson in ethics from a wild pig…Oh, Parth, will I ever get out of the forest? Does it ever end?"

He worked his way on up the steepening, brushy slopes of the ridge. At the top the woods thinned out and through the trees he saw sunlight and the sky. A few paces more and he was out from under the branches, on the rim of a green slope that dropped down to a sweep of orchards and plow-lands and at last to a wide, clear river. On the far side of the river a herd of fifty or more cattle grazed in a long fenced meadow, above which hayfields and orchards rose steepening towards the tree-rimmed western ridge. A short way south of where Falk stood the river turned a little around a low knoll, over the shoulder of which, gilt by the low, late sun, rose the red chimneys of a house.