Here, where the yellow pine-straw covered the ground, there was no good surface for tracks, a situation not helped by the fact that the bandit had not worn boots. Like the poorest beggars in Gae before the Dark Ones came, he had wrapped his feet in strips of hide. Still, where the man's marks crossed one of the dozen meltwater streams, the Icefalcon found in the mud of the water's verge the tracks of three others.

All four had stood there together, not long before the one bandit had gone to meet Hethya, Linok, and his destiny in the clearing. The other men had gone southwest.

The Icefalcon frowned. The light was sufficiently dim that he had to crouch for a closer look.

There was no mistaking it. All four men were the same height, judging by the length of their strides, and all four exactly the same weight.

The Icefalcon had grown up able to differentiate between the tracks of his grandfather's white mare Blossom Horse and those of his cousin's mare Flirt and those of any other horse owned by anyone in the family. He had been able to recognize the prints of individual dogs, of anyone in the family or in the larger People, and of many of the members of the wild herds of reindeer, yak, bison, and mammoth as well.

Tracks, and scat, and individual habits of beasts were the topic of most conversations around the longhouse fires in winter and under the summer stars while hunting in the Cursed Lands or the Night River Country. They were the heart and business of the Real World, told over the way civilized people told over Gil's useless tales of enchantment and romance. The Icefalcon could no more have been mistaken than he could have thought that a prairie chicken's feather belonged to a red-tailed hawk.

Three of the four bandits had wrapped their feet in the same way, and the hide wrappings were thin enough to show him that they all walked in the same fashion as well. Not just that they all toed in slightly, but that they all put their weight on their heels in the same way. Had all worn boots, the pattern of wear on the soles would have been identical.