The Defiant Agents | Page 9

of morning light, that the four-footed ones trotting
with him as he walked aimlessly had unbeastlike traits. Not only did they face him
eye-to-eye, but in some ways they appeared able to read his thoughts.
He had longed for water to ease the burning in his throat, the ever-present pain in his
head, and the creatures had nudged him in another direction, bringing him to a pool
where he had drunk liquid with a strangely sweet, but not unpleasant taste.
Now he had given them names, names which had come out of the welter of dreams which
shadowed his stumbling journey across this weird country.
Nalik'ideyu (Maiden-Who-Walks-Ridges) was the female who continued to shepherd him
along, never venturing too far from his side. Naginlta (He-Who-Scouts-Ahead) was the
male who did just that, disappearing at long intervals and then returning to face the man
and his mate as if conveying some report necessary to their journey.
It was Nalik'ideyu who sought Travis now, her red tongue lolling from her mouth as she
panted. Not from exertion, he was certain of that. No, she was excited and eager... on the
hunt! That was it--a hunt!
Travis' own tongue ran across his lips as an impression hit him with feral force. There
was meat--rich, fresh--just ahead. Meat that lived, waiting to be killed. Inside him his
own avid hunger roused, shaking him farther out of the crusting dream.
His hands went to his waist, but the groping fingers did not find what vague memory told
him should be there--a belt, heavy with knife in sheath.
He examined his own body with attention to find he was adequately covered by breeches

of a smooth, dull brown material which blended well with the vegetation about him. He
wore a loose shirt, belted in at the narrow waist by a folded strip of cloth, the ends of
which fluttered free. On his feet were tall moccasins, the leg pieces extending some
distance up his calves, the toes turned up in rounded points.
Some of this he found familiar, but these were fragments of memory; again his mind
fitted one picture above another. One thing he did know for sure--he had no weapons.
And that realization struck home with a thrust of real and terrible fear which tore away
more of the bewilderment cloaking his mind.
Nalik-ideyu was impatient. Having advanced a step or two, she now looked back at him
over her shoulder, yellow eyes slitted, her demand on him as instant and real as if she had
voiced understandable words. Meat was waiting, and she was hungry. Also she expected
Travis to aid in the hunt--at once.
Though he could not match her fluid grace in moving through the grass, Travis followed
her, keeping to cover. He shook his head vigorously, in spite of the stab of pain the
motion cost him, and paid more attention to his surroundings. It was apparent that the
earth under him, the grass around, the valley of the golden haze, were all real, not part of
a dream. Therefore that other countryside which he kept seeing in a ghostly fashion was a
hallucination.
Even the air which he drew into his lungs and expelled again, had a strange smell, or was
it taste? He could not be sure which. He knew that hypno-training could produce odd side
effects, but... this...
Travis paused, staring unseeingly before him at the grass still waving from the coyote's
passage. Hypno-training! What was that? Now three pictures fought to focus in his mind:
the two landscapes which did not match and a shadowy third. He shook his head again,
his hands to his temples. This--this only was real: the ground, the grass, the valley, the
hunger in him, the hunt waiting...
He forced himself to concentrate on the immediate present and the portion of world he
could see, feel, scent, which lay here and now about him.
The grass grew shorter as he proceeded in Nalik'ideyu's wake. But the haze was not
thinning. It seemed to hang in patches, and when he ventured through the edge of a patch
it was like creeping through a fog of golden, dancing motes. Here and there a glittering
speck whirled and darted like a living thing. Masked by the stuff, Travis reached a line of
brush and sniffed.
It was a warm scent, a heavy odor he could not identify and yet one he associated with a
living creature. Flat to earth, he pushed head and shoulders under the low limbs of the
bush to look ahead.
Here was a space where the fog did not hold, a pocket of earth clear under the morning
sun. And grazing there were three animals. Again shock cleared a portion of Travis'
bemused brain.

They were about the size, he thought, of