Lake unbuttoned the pocket and gave Tip a herb leaf. “I notice there’s no nonsensical chatter when you want to ask for something to eat.”
Tip took the herb leaf but he spoke again before he began to eat; slowly, as though trying seriously to express a thought:
“Tip hungry—no nonsensical.”
“Sometimes,” he said, turning his head to look at Tip, “you mockers give me the peculiar feeling that you’re right on the edge of becoming a new and intelligent race and no fooling.”
Tip wiggled his whiskers and bit into the herb leaf. “No fooling,” he agreed.
*
*
*
He stopped for the night in a steep-walled hollow and built a small fire of dead moss and grass to ward off the chill that came with dark. He called the others, thinking first of Schroeder so that Tip would transmit to Schroeder’s mocker:
“Steve?”
“Here,” Tip answered, in a detectable imitation of Schroeder’s voice. “No luck.”
He thought of Gene Taylor and called, “Gene?”
There was no answer and he called Chiara. “Tony—could you see any of Gene’s route today?”
“Part of it,” Chiara answered. “I saw a herd of unicorns over that way. Why—doesn’t he answer?”
“No.”
“Then,” Chiara said, “they must have got him.”
“Did you find anything today, Tony?” he asked.
“Nothing but pure andesite. Not even an iron stain.”
It was the same kind of barren formation that he, himself, had been walking over all day. But he had not expected success so soon …
He tried once again to call Gene Taylor:
“Gene … Gene … are you there, Gene?”
There was no answer. He knew there would never be.
*
*
*
The days became weeks with dismaying swiftness as they penetrated farther into the north. The hills became more rugged and there were intrusions of granite and other formations to promise a chance of finding metal; a promise that urged them on faster as their time grew shorter.
Twice he saw something white in the distance. Once it was the bones of another band of woods goats that had huddled together and frozen to death in some early blizzard of the past and once it was the bones of a dozen unicorns.
The nights grew chillier and the suns moved faster and faster to the south. The animals began to migrate, an almost imperceptible movement in the beginning but one that increased each day. The first frost came and the migration began in earnest. By the third day it was a hurrying tide.
Tip was strangely silent that day. He did not speak until the noon sun had cleared the cold, heavy mists of
