on which she sat was a pile of bones, great and small, that extended down into the plain and far out.
Nowhere was any human being in sight.
Softly, she said, “Kickaha?”
It was hard to believe that he could be dead.
She turned and waved to McKay to halt. He did so, and she started her beast towards him. And then she felt the earth shaking around her. Her gregg stopped despite her commands to keep going, and it remained locked in position, though quivering. She got down off of it and tried to pull it by the reins, but it dug in, leaning its body back. She mounted again and waited.
The slope was changing swiftly, sinking at the rate of about a foot a minute. The channel was closing up, the sides moving toward each other, and apparently the bottom was moving up, since the water was slopping over its lips.
Heat arose from the ground.
McKay was in the same predicament. His moosoid stubbornly refused to obey despite his rider’s beatings with the shaft of his spear.
She turned on the saddle to look behind her. The ridge was becoming a mountain range, a tiny range now but it was evident that if this process didn’t stop, it would change into a long and giant barrow. The animals along it were running down its slopes, their destination the ever-increasing depressions along its sides.
However, the two mountains that formed the pass remained solid, immovable.
Anana sighed. There was nothing she could do except sit and wait this out unless she wanted to dismount. The gregg, from long experience, must know the right thing to do.
It was like being on a slow-moving elevator, one in which the temperature rose as the elevator fell. Actually, she felt as if the mountains on her side were rising instead of the ground descending.
The entire change lasted about an hour. At the end the channel had disappeared, the ridge had stopped swelling and had sunk, the hollows had been filled, and the plain had been restored to the bases of the mountains just outside the sea-land. The animals which had been desperately scrambling around to adjust to the terrain-change were now grazing upon the grass. The predators were now stalking the meat on the hoof. Business as usual.
Anana tickticked with her tongue to the gregg, and it trotted toward the sea. McKay waited for her to come to him. He didn’t ask her if she’d seen Kickaha. He knew that if she had she would have said so. He merely shook his head and said, “Crazy country, ain’t it?”
“It lost us more than hour, all things considered,” she said. “I don’t see any reason to push the grewigg though. They’re not fully recovered yet. We’ll just take it easy. We should find those Indians sometime after dark. They’ll be camped for the night.”
“Yeah, some place in the woods,” he said. “We might just ride on by them and in the morning they’ll be on our tails.”
About three hours after the bright bands of the sky had darkened, Anana’s gregg stopped, softly rumbling in its throat. She urged it forward with soft words until she saw, through the half-light, a vague figure. She and McKay retreated for a hundred yards and held a short conference. McKay didn’t object when she decided that she would take out the guards while he stayed behind.
“I hope the guard don’t make any noise when you dispose of him,” he said. “What’ll I do if he raises a ruckus?”
“Wait and see if anyone else hears him. If they do, then ride like hell to me, bringing my gregg, and we’ll take off the way we came. Unless, that is, most of the Indians are in the woods. Maybe there’s only a guard or two on the beach itself. But I don’t plan on making a mistake.
“You’re the boss,” McKay said. “Good luck.”
She went into the woods, moving swiftly when there was no obstruction, slowly when she had to make her way among thick bushes. At last, she was opposite the guard, close enough to see that he was a short stocky man. In the dim light she couldn’t make out his features, but she could hear him muttering to himself. He carried a stone-tipped spear in one hand and a war boomerang was stuck in a belt around his waist. He paced back and forth, generally taking about twenty steps each way.