a separate ache and soreness.
He crossed a little stream and stopped to drink. Then he lay down in the running water. The icy touch of it burned in his raw flesh.
He rose and slunk on.
Instinct that was not his own but Asha's told him where to lair. He crept into a hollow between two great gnarled roots, where it was warm.
There he lay down and began, wolf-like, to lick his wounds.
Night darkened over the valley of L'Lan.
Chapter XI
FOREST DANGER
He had slept for a time but he had dreamed and the dreams were full of terror. He woke suddenly as a man wakes from nightmare, with a start and a cry, and the howling sound of his own wolf-voice reminded him that the nightmare was reality.
He lay alone in the depths of the nighted forest and suffered as few men have suffered since the beginning of the world. Then, gradually, when he found that he was not going to die or go mad, the mind of Eric Nelson began to function again.
Nelson had lived a long time in the wild places of the world. He had spent years on the ragged edge of death and his inner fiber had been hammered into toughness. After the first black wave of horror passed it became a point of pride with him. He would not break. He would not give in and let himself be whipped by anything Kree and his people could do to him.
Again Nelson was conscious of the strange linking of his mind with another mind. Almost without his knowing it, the night and the forest had become familiar. He had spent many nights in the woods but never before had he had this intimate kinship with them. The forest was alive, teeming with its own secret business, and to the new Eric Nelson the secrets were all an open book, infinitely fascinating.
His keen ears told him of the motion of the grasses, the stirring of the trees, the rush of distant water in a streambed. Somewhere near him a mouse scuttered across a dry leaf and above him he could hear plainly the squeaking of a bat and the sound its leathery wings made on the air. Far away down the valley a deer went crashing through a deadfall and behind it rose the deep hunting cry of a tiger.
Eric Nelson felt the sweet taut thrill of excitement that passed through his borrowed body. He was hungry. The wind brought him news. He drew it in through quivering nostrils, rich and tangled and throbbing scents, the breath of the forest that was his mother because it had been Asha's mother.
He rose and stretched himself, wincing and grunting because he was very sore. Then he stepped out into the moonlight and stood with his head up, turning it slowly to quarter the wind, his nose twitching.
Downwind it was all a blank, but upwind a small pack of wolves was driving a buck. They were going away from him, and he must remember to stay clear. The tiger had killed. Down by the stream a band of Hoofed Ones had come to drink, and there were deer with them.
He would not run a deer. The whole forest would know of it. He would be content with a rabbit. Grim determination steeled Nelson's mind. He was going to Anshan and somehow he would bring Barin back to Vruun. But in the meantime they had made him a wolf. Very well, he would be a wolf.
The distant hunting call of the pack moaned and wailed down the valley. His throat quivered to answer it but he kept silent. Then, like a lean gray wraith in the splashing silver moonlight, he loped away south, toward Anshan.
At first it was difficult to move, but as his stiff body warmed and loosened he forgot his hunger in the delight of going. His man-body had been a pretty good one. It was tough and lithe and quicker than most. But it was a dull, clumsy thing compared to the one he had now.
The body of Asha was sensitively alive, from the bottoms of its padded paws to the tip of its nose. Every nerve and muscle worked to a hair-trigger reflex. It could thread its way like a lightning-flash through a thicket of brush and never so much as stir a leaf. It could stop stock-still without a quiver and it could soar over a deadfall like an arrow going home. And it could run. Gods of the forest, how it could run!
Nelson had known that when they drove him out of Vruun. But there had been no pleasure in running then. Now he sped down the open ridges for the sheer joy of it, rushing through the pools of moonlight, whirling and pouncing, playing delightedly with the shadows.
He crept upwind upon a little band of deer feeding by a pond. For a time he lay in the long grass and watched them, slender lovely things with their moist black noses and great eyes. A tall buck and two does and a fawn. The rich sweet odor of them made his mouth water.
Presently he rose and walked boldly out into the clearing. They lifted their heads and froze, staring at him- fleet-limbed children of flight and fear. Then they snorted the wolf-taint out of their nostrils and were gone.
He went to the pool and drank. His reflection looked up at him from the moonlit water, and he ran his tongue over his teeth and glared back wolf-eyed at himself.
He went southward again, ever southward toward An-shan, and he found no rabbits. He began to be aware that the game was moving. Time and again he crossed the new trails of deer and smaller beasts, all drifting westward. Word had gone through the forest that even the true beasts who were not of the Brotherhood could understand, and they were moving on both sides of the river, back to the barrier cliffs, leaving the forest to the Clans.
The wind, which had been blowing steadily from the south, dropped and then died altogether. Nelson felt a strange muffling of his senses then. It was like being partly blind and deaf because he could no longer tell what was happening upwind. He moved with increased caution and he was hungry, very hungry.
He came down to the edge of a wide shallow stream and suddenly, with a flying clatter of hoofs, a dappled mare and her foal came splashing across the fiord and up the low bank beside him.
'Greetings, Hairy One,' came the mare's thought, She stopped to blow and, through Asha's wolf-senses, Nelson could smell the fear on her. The little inky-black foal whickered and pushed his head against his mother's flanks, his long ridiculous legs planted far apart and trembling. Both of them were streaked with sweat. 'You have run far, oh Sister,' said Nelson, through Asha's mind.
'North from Anshan,' answered the mare, and shivered. She nosed the foal's thin neck tenderly and added, 'I could not come before because of him.'
'Anshan?' said Nelson. 'I go toward there now.'
'I know. The Clans are gathering for war.' The rolling eyes of the mare showed white in the moonlight, 'There is death in the forest, Hairy One! There is death in the valley of L'Lan!'
And the little black foal started. With lifted head and rolling eyes in imitation of his mother, he echoed, 'Death! Death! Death!' His tiny hoofs made a rattling sound on the stones.
'Hush, little one,' whispered the mare and stroked his quivering neck. 'What do you know of death?'
'I pastured on the slopes above Anshan,' the mare told Nelson, 'because my mate was taken by the Humanites and I wanted to be near him. The foal was born there. There was killing in the valley below us. The outlanders had come with their new fire-weapons and many of the Brotherhood were killed.'
'Death,' said the foal again, and whinnied like a child crying. 'I am afraid.'
Nelson reassured with his thought. 'You're safe now, little one. There is no death here.'
But there would be, Nelson knew. Sooner or later the fire-weapons would bring death to the gates of Vruun and the little foal, if he lived, would one day be bitted and shod and bridled, broken to bear the weight of man.
Looking at them there in the moonlight, Nelson was aware of a strange revulsion at that thought, as though they had been his own kind, enslaved and toiling in chains.
The mare's gentle thought came into his mind.
