Storm Over Warlock | Page 5

golden haze of the sky. A flight of
vivid green streaks marked a flock of lake ducks coming for a morning
feeding. Lake duck was good eating, but Shann had no time to hunt one
now. Togi started down the bank of the stream, Taggi behind her.
Either they had caught his choice subtly through some undefined
mental contact, or they had already picked that road on their own.
Shann's attention was caught by a piece of the drift. He twisted the
length free and had his first weapon of his own manufacture, a club.
Using it to hold back a low sweeping branch, he followed the
wolverines.
Within the half hour he had breakfast, too. A pair of limp skitterers,
their long hind feet lashed together with a thong of grass, hung from his

belt. They were not particularly good eating, but they were meat and
acceptable.
The three, man and wolverines, made their way up the stream to the
valley wall and through a feeder ravine into the larger space beyond.
There, where the stream was born at the foot of a falls, they made their
first camp. Judging that the morning haze would veil any smoke, Shann
built a pocket-size fire. He seared rather than roasted the skitterers after
he had made an awkward and messy business of skinning them, and
tore the meat from the delicate bones in greedy mouthfuls. The
wolverines lay side by side on the gravel, now and again raising a head
alertly to test the scent on the air, or gaze into the distance.
Taggi made a warning sound deep in the throat. Shann tossed handfuls
of sand over the dying fire. He had only time to fling himself
face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his uniform faded
into the color of the earth on which he lay, every muscle tense.
A shadow swung across the hillside. Shann's shoulders hunched, and he
cowered again. That terror he had known on the ledge was back in full
force as he waited for the beam to lick at him as it had earlier at his
fellows. The Throgs were on the hunt....

2. DEATH OF A SHIP
That sigh of displaced air was not as loud as a breeze, but it echoed
monstrously in Shann's ears. He could not believe in his luck as that
sound grew fainter, drew away into the valley he had just left. With
infinite caution he raised his head from his arm, still hardly able to
accept the fact that he had not been sighted, that the Throgs and their
flyer were gone.
But that black plate was spinning out into the sun haze. One of the
beetles might have suspected that there were Terran fugitives and
ordered a routine patrol. After all, how could the aliens know that they
had caught all but one of the Survey party in camp? Though with all the

Terran scout flitters grounded on the field, the men dead in their bunks,
the surprise would seem to be complete.
As Shann moved, Taggi and Togi came to life also. They had gone to
earth with speed, and the man was sure that both beasts had sensed
danger. Not for the first time he knew a burning desire for the formal
education he had never had. In camp he had listened, dragging out
routine jobs in order to overhear reports and the small talk of specialists
keen on their own particular hobbies. But so much of the information
Shann had thus picked up to store in a retentive memory he had not
understood and could not fit together. It had been as if he were trying to
solve some highly important puzzle with at least a quarter of the
necessary pieces missing, or with unrelated bits from others intermixed.
How much control did a trained animal scout have over his furred or
feathered assistants? And was part of that mastery a mental rapport
built up between man and animal?
How well would the wolverines obey him now, especially when they
would not return to camp where cages stood waiting as symbols of
human authority? Wouldn't a trek into the wilderness bring about a
revolt for complete freedom? If Shann could depend upon the animals,
it would mean a great deal. Not only would their superior hunting
ability provide all three with food, but their scouting senses, so much
keener than his, might erect a slender wall between life and death.
Few large native beasts had been discovered on Warlock by the Terran
explorers. And of those four or five different species, none had proved
hostile if unprovoked. But that did not mean that somewhere back in
the wild lands into which Shann was heading there were no heretofore
unknowns, perhaps slyer and as