They ranged from comparative runts no more than fifteen feet long to one monster who must have been well over forty. His skull alone was a yard wide, and each of the jutting spikes along his back was two feet high. Each scale on his belly was the size of a man's hand. Like all the others, he was a greenish-black on the back and head, and a dirty orange on the belly and the insides of his four clawed legs. The creatures looked like some nightmarish horned caricature of a crocodile.

Some of the creatures were smeared with dried blood and shreds of flesh from their night's victims. All of them seemed to be in a bad temper. They honked, hissed, slapped their tails on the ground, and occasionally hurled challenges to fight. Then two of them would go at each other with horns and teeth, rolling over and over, clawing at the ground, lashing out with their tails hard enough to flatten bushes and small trees. None of the fights seemed to hurt anything except the undergrowth.

Eventually each of the horned crocodiles plunged into the lower pool, briefly sank out of sight, then swam off downstream with only its eyes above water. Blade waited until the last one was gone, then waited a little longer to be on the safe side. By the time he finally climbed down, it was full daylight.

He looked downstream as far as he could see, without finding any sign of the creatures. Apparently they hunted along the banks by night, then laired up in the water by day. If he traveled by day and spent the nights in the trees, he should still be able to follow the course of the stream without any unfortunate meetings with the crocodiles.

He'd still better have some sort of weapon against them. No matter how alert he was or how thoroughly the creatures stayed hidden by day, he didn't want to rely on luck and his ability to outrun them. But did he have any chance of making an effective weapon? The crocodiles were as long as small boats, they must weigh as much as large automobiles, and they were far more agile out of the water than any similar Home Dimension creatures. Their tooth-lined jaws could probably snap Blade in half at a single bite.