For a brief moment he thought of the fantastic device of grabbing hold of her tail and following her through the dark. But she was gone, and the idea wouldn’t have worked, anyway. More than likely she’d have turned and bitten his hands until he released her.
There was nothing to do but make his own way back.
After ten minutes of frantic struggling, during which he suddenly realized he’d turned the wrong way and was wandering away from the edge of the island, he saw the clouds disappear. With the bright moon came vision and sanity. He turned around and in a short time was back at the cove.
“What happened to you?” asked Amra. “We thought maybe you’d fallen off the edge.”
“That’s about all that didn’t happen,” he said, irritated now that he had been so easily lost. He told them where the yachts were and added, “We’ll have to let one down by a rope before we can connect it to the davits. It’ll take a lot of pushing and pulling, a lot of muscle. Everybody up on the hill, including the children!”
Wearily, they climbed up the slope to the top and shoved one of the ‘rollers up the slight incline of the depression to the lip of the hill. Green picked up one of the wet ropes lying on the ground and passed it around the tree. Its trunk had a groove where many ropes had worn a path during similar operations. One end he gave to half of the party, putting Miran in charge of them. The other end he tied in a bowknot to a huge iron eye which projected from the stern of the craft. Then, ordering the other half of the women to help him push, he got the ‘roller over the lip and down the slope, while the rope gang slowly released the double loop around the tree in short jerks.
When the craft had halted by the davits, Green untied the rope. His next step would be to back the yacht in between the davits so that he could hook up its ropes and lift it. Fortunately, there was a winch and cable for this. Unfortunately, the winch was hand-operated and had been allowed to get rusty. It would work only with great resistance and with loud squeaking. Not that more noise mattered, for the party had made so much that only the fact that the wind was from the east could have kept the savages in ignorance of the survivors’ whereabouts.
It was as if his thinking of them had brought them upon the scene. Grizquetr, who’d been stationed in a tree as a sentinel, called down, “I see a torch! It’s somewhere in the woods, about half a mile away. Oh! There’s another one! And another one!”
Green said, “Do you think they’re on the path that leads here?”
“I don’t know. But they’re coming this way, winding here and there, wandering like Samdroo when he was lost in the Mirrored Mazes of Gil-Ka-Ku, The Black One! Yes, they must be on the path!”
Green began feverishly tying the davit-ropes to the axles of the craft. He sweated with anxiety and cursed when his fumbling fingers got in the way of his haste. But the tying of the four bowknots actually took less than a minute, in spite of the way time seemed to race past him.
That done he had to order off the yacht some of the women who had climbed aboard. Only the women who had to take care of very small infants and the older children were to be on that boat.
“Just who do you think is going to work the winch?” he barked at the too-eager. “Now, jump to it!”
One of the women on the ‘roller wailed, “Are you going to stay on the island and leave us all alone on this ‘roller in the midst of the Xurdimur?”
“No,” he answered, as calmly as possible. “We’re going to lower you to the ground. Then we’re going back up the hill and shove the other ‘rollers over the edge so that they can’t be used by the savages to come after us. Well jump off and walk back to you.”