Star Hunter | Page 8

His head ached dully, of that he was conscious first. As he turned, without opening his
eyes, he felt the brush of softness against his cheek, and a pungent odor fill his nostrils.
He opened his eyes, stared up past a rim of broken rock toward the cloudless, blue-green
sky. A relay clicked into proper place deep in his mind.
Of course! He had been trying to lure a strong-jaws out of its traphole with hooked bait,
then his foot had slipped. Rynch Brodie sat up, flexed his bare thin arms, and moved his
long legs experimentally. No broken bones, anyway. But still he frowned. Odd--that
dream which jarred with the here and now.

Crawling to the side of the creek, he dipped head and shoulders into the water, letting the
chill of the stream flush away some of his waking bewilderment. He shook himself,
making the drops fly from his uncovered torso and arms, and then discovered his hunting
tackle.
He stood for a moment fingering each piece of his scanty clothing, recalling every piece
of labor or battle which had added pouch, belt, strip of fabric to his equipment. Yet--there
was still that odd sense of strangeness, as if none of this was really his.
Rynch shook his head, wiped his wet face with his arm. It was all his, that was sure,
every bit of it. He'd been lucky, the survival manual on the L-B had furnished him with
general directions and this was a world which was not unfriendly--not if one was
prepared for trouble.
He climbed up and loosened the net, coiling its folds into one hand, taking the good spear
in his other. A bush stirred ahead, against the pull of the light breeze. Rynch froze, then
the haft of his spear slid into a new hand grip, the coils of his net spun out. A snarl cut
over the purr of water.
The scarlet blot which sprang for his throat was met with the flail of the net. Rynch
stabbed twice at the creature he had so swept off balance. A water-cat, this year's cub.
Dying, its claws, over-long in proportion to its paws, drew inch deep furrows in the earth
and gravel. Its eyes, almost the same shade as its long, burr-entangled body fur, glared up
at him in deathly enmity.
As Rynch watched, that feeling that he was studying something strange, utterly alien,
came to him once again. Yet he had hunted water-cats for many seasons. Fortunately they
were solitary, evil-tempered beasts that marked out a roaming territory to defend it from
others of their kind, and not too many were to be encountered in cross-country travel.
He stooped to pull his net from the now still paws. Some definite place he must reach.
The compulsion to move on in that sudden flash shook him, raised the dull ache still
troubling his temples into a punishing throb. Going down on his knees, Rynch once more
turned to the stream water; this time after splashing it onto his face, he drank from his
cupped hands.
Rynch swayed, his wet hands over his eyes, digging fingertips into the skin of his
forehead to ease that pain bursting in his skull. Sitting in a room, drinking from a cup--it
was as if a shadow picture fitted over the reality of the stream, rocks and brush about him.
He had sat in a room, had drank from a cup--that action had been important!
A sharp, hot pain made him lose contact with that shadow. He looked down. From the
gravel, from under rocks, gathered an army of blue-black, hard-shelled things, their
clawed forelimbs extended, blue sense organs raised on fleshy stalks well above their
heads, all turned towards the dead feline.
Rynch slapped out vigorously, stumbled into the water loosening the hold of two vicious
scavengers on the torn skin of his ankle when he waded out knee-deep. Already that

black tongue of small bodies licked across the red-haired side of the hunter. Within
minutes the corpse would be only well-cleaned bones.
Retrieving his spear and net, Rynch immersed both in the water to clean off attackers,
and hurried on, splashing through the creek until he was well away from the vicinity of
the kill. A little later he flushed a four-footed creature from between two rocks and killed
it with one blow from his spear haft. He skinned his kill, feeling the substance of the skill.
Was it exceedingly rough hide, or rudimentary scales? And knew a return of that
puzzlement.
He felt, he thought painfully as he toasted the dry looking, grayish meat on a sharpened
stick, as if a part of him knew very well what manner of animal he had killed. And yet,
far inside him, another person he could not understand stood