Without weapons or speed, they must conceive a trap. Again Travis sensed agreement from the ga-n, and with it a strong impression urging him to the right. He was making progress with skill he did not even recognize and which he had never been conscious of learning.
The bushes and small, droop-limbed trees, had branches not clothed with leaves from proper twigs but with a reddish bristly growth protruding directly from their surfaces. The trees screened the pocket-sized meadow, reaching a rocky cleft where the mist curled in a long tongue through a wall twice Travis’ height. If the browsers could be maneuvered into taking the path through that cleft . . .
Travis searched about him, and his hands closed upon the oldest weapon of his species, a stone pulled from the earth and balanced neatly in the palm of his hand. It was a long chance but his best one.
The Apache took the first step on a new and fearsome road. These ga-n had put their thoughts—or their desires—into his mind. Could he so contact them in return?
With the stone clenched in his fist, his shoulders pressed against the wall not too far from the cleft opening, Travis strove to think out, clearly and simply, his poor plan. He did not know that he was reacting the way scientists light years away had hoped he might. Nor did Travis guess that at this point he had already traveled far beyond the expectations of the men who had bred and trained the two mutant coyotes. He only believed that he was obeying the wishes of two spirits he thought far more powerful than any man. So he pictured in his mind the cleft, the running creatures, and the part the ga-n could play if they so willed.
Assent—in its way as loud and clear as if shouted. The man fingered the stone, weighed it. There would probably be just one moment when he could use it to effect, so he must be ready.
From this point he could no longer see the small meadow where the grazers were. But Travis knew, as well as if he watched the scene, that the coyotes were creeping in, belly flat to earth, adding a feline stealth and patience to their own cunning.
There! Travis’ head jerked, the alert had come, the drive was beginning. He tensed, gripping his stone.
A yapping bark was answered by a sound he could not describe, a noise midway between a cough and a grunt. Again a yap-yap . . .
A toad-head burst through the screen of brush, the double horn on its nose festooned with grass torn up by the roots. Wide eyes—milky and seeming to be without pupils—fastened on Travis, but he could not be sure the thing saw him, for it kept on, picking up speed as it approached the cleft. Behind it ran the calf, and that guttural cry was bubbling from its broad flat lips.
The long neck of the adult writhed, the frog-head swung closer to the ground so that the twin points of the horn were at a slant—aimed now at Travis. He had been right to suspect their deadliness, but he had only a fleeting chance to recognize that fact as the thing bore down, clearly intent on goring him.
He hurled his stone and then flung his body to one side, tumbling and rolling into the brush where he fought madly to regain his feet, expecting at any moment to feel trampling hoofs and thrusting horns. There was a crash to his right, as the bushes and grass were wildly shaken.
On his hands and knees the Apache retreated, his head turned to watch behind him. He saw the flirt of a triangular flap-tail in the mouth of the cleft. The calf had escaped. And now the threshing in the bushes stilled.
Was the thing stalking him? He got to his feet, for the first time hearing clearly the continued yapping, as if a battle was in progress. Then the second of the adult beasts came into view, backing and turning, trying to keep its lowered head with menacing double horn always pointed to the coyotes as they danced a teasing, worrying circle about it.
One of the coyotes flung up its head, looked upslope, and barked. Then, as one, both rushed the fighting beast, but for the first time from the same side, leaving it a clear path to retreat. It made a rush before which they fled easily. Then it whirled with a speed and grace, which did not fit its ungainly, ill-proportioned body, and jumped toward the cleft, the coyotes making no effort to hinder its escape.
Travis came out of cover, approaching the brush which had concealed the crash of the other animal. The actions of the coyotes had convinced him that there was no danger now; they would never have allowed the escape of their prey had the first beast not been downed.
His shot with the stone, the Apache decided as he stood moments later surveying the twitching crumpled body, must have hit the thing in the head, stunning it. Then the momentum of its charge had carried it full force against the rock to kill it. Blind luck—or the power of the ga-n? He pulled back as the coyotes came padding up shoulder to shoulder to inspect the kill. It was truly more theirs than his.
Their prey yielded not only food but a weapon for Travis. Instead of the belt knife he had remembered having, he was now equipped with two. The double horn had been easy to free from the shattered skull, and some careful work with stones had broken off one prong at just the angle he wanted. So now he had a short and a longer tool, defense. At least they were better than the stone with which he had entered the hunt.
Nalik-ideyu pushed past him to lap daintily at the water. Then she sat up on her haunches, watching Travis as he smoothed the horn with a stone.
“A knife,” he said to her, “this will be a knife. And—” he glanced up, measuring the value of the wood represented by trees and bushes—”then a bow. With a bow we shall hunt better.”
The coyote yawned, her yellow eyes half closed, a study in satisfaction and content.
“A knife,” Travis repeated, “and a bow.” He needed weapons; he had to have them!
Why? His hand stopped scraping. Why? The toad-faced double horn had been quick to attack, but Travis could have avoided it, and it had not hunted him first. Why was he ridden by this fear that he must not be unarmed?
He dipped his hand into the pool of the spring and lifted the water to cool his sweating face. The coyote moved, turned around in the grass, crushing down the growth into a nest in which she curled up, head on paws. But Travis sat back on his heels, his now idle hands hanging down between his knees, and forced himself to the task of sorting out jumbled memories.
This landscape was wrong—totally unlike what it should be—but it was real. He had helped kill this alien creature. He had eaten its meat, raw. Its horn lay within touch now. All that was real and unchangeable. Which meant that the rest of it, that other desert world in which he had wandered with his kind, ridden horses, raided invading men of another race, that was not real—or else far, far removed from where he now sat.
Yet there had been no dividing line between those two worlds. One moment he had been in the desert place, returning from a successful foray against the Mexicans. Mexicans! Travis caught at that identification, tried to use it as a thread to draw closer to the beginning of his mystery.
Mexicans . . . And he was an Apache, one of the Eagle people, one who rode with Cochise. No!
Sweat again beaded his face where the water had cooled it. He was not of that past. He was Travis Fox, of the early twenty-first century, not a nomad of the middle nineteenth! He was of Team A of the project!
The Arizona desert and then this! From one to the other in an instant. He looked about him in rising fear. Wait! He had been in the dark when he got out of the desert, lying in a box. Getting out, he had crawled down a passage to reach moonlight, strange moonlight.
A box in which he had lain, a passage with smooth metallic walls, and an alien world at the end of it.
The coyote’s ears twitched, her head came up, she was staring at the man’s drawn face, at his eyes with their core of fear. She whined.
Travis caught up the two pieces of horn, thrust them into his sash belt, and got to his feet. Nalik’ideyu sat up, her head cocked a little to one side. As the man turned to seek his own back trail she padded along in his wake and whined for Naginlta. But Travis was more intent now on what he must prove to himself than he was on the actions of the two animals.