The weather was more and more often bleak. Often lean feral cats, beautiful little creatures with their pied or striped fur and green eyes, waited within sight of his campfire for the leavings of his meat, and came forward with sly, shy fierceness to carry off the bones he tossed them: their rodent prey was scarce now, hibernating through the cold. No beasts since the house of Fear had spoken to or bespoken him. The animals in the lovely, icy, lowland woods he was now crossing had never been tampered with, had never seen or scented man, perhaps. And as it fell farther and farther behind him he saw its strangeness more clearly, that house hidden in its peaceful valley, its very foundations alive with mice that squeaked in human speech, its people revealing a great knowledge, the truth-drug, and a barbaric ignorance. The Enemy had been there.

That the Enemy had ever been here was doubtful. Nobody had ever been here. Nobody ever would be. Jays screamed in the gray branches. Frost-rimed brown leaves crackled underfoot, the leaves of hundreds of autumns. A tall stag looked at Falk across a little meadow, motionless, questioning his right to be there.

"I won't shoot you. Bagged two hens this morning," Falk said.

The stag stared at him with the lordly self-possession of the speechless, and walked slowly off. Nothing feared Falk, here. Nothing spoke to him. He thought that in the end he might forget speech again and become as he had been, dumb, wild, unhuman. He had gone too far away from men and had come where the dumb creatures ruled and men had never come.

At the meadow's edge he stumbled over a stone, and on hands and knees read weatherworn letters carved in the half-buried block: CK O.