"All right." She nodded, casually. "I'll get up."
She did. She got up fast, like a rocksnake uncoiling, and she had a
big stone in her right hand. She let it go, straight for his head.
Kirk jerked himself aside, but he was too late. The rock grazed him
above the ear. He staggered, trying to see through a curtain of hot and
flashing lights.
His earcups, working instinctively by themselves, brought him the sound
of naked feet scrambling away over the pebble drifts.
Feet. And then something else....
Kirk yelled. He tried to shake the lights away, and yelled again.
"Stop! Look out--_shags!_"
* * * * *
He heard her stop. He began to be able to see again. She was poised
halfway up the head wall of the cut, her ears twitching. For a long
time they stood that way, not moving, listening to the wind and the
rolling pebbles and the soft padding feet of things that were hungry
and hunting them.
She began to move, almost without sound, back to him. Her lips formed
the word "Two," and her yellow head jerked back the way she had been
going. Kirk nodded. He pointed off to the left and held up three
fingers. Then he turned and started down the gully. The girl stayed
close beside him. She was breathing rapidly and her pupils swelled and
shrank. They showed no fear.
Looking at them, Kirk thought of Lil. Lil was right. She did have pink
lids to her eyes, and they were beautiful.
The shags followed them, two behind, three beside them beyond a thin
wall of rock.
Kirk had never been in the outer gullies before. He was too young. But
he'd heard Pa and the older men talk about them from the time he was
old enough to crouch beside the heat-stones and listen.
Out here there were shags and scavenger rats and once in a while a
rocksnake. Men of the settlement never hunted beyond the fringe. Beyond
that was forbidden ground and Piruts. Nobody knew just where the Pirut
colony was any more. Nobody wanted to know.
Kirk's ears were stretched, sifting the tiny shattered echoes. His
spread pupils sucked in every bit of the dim grey light. His body hair
was erect so that even his skin acted as a sensory organ, feeling the
bodies of the shags behind them.
They were getting close.
The gully ended. Beyond it was a little space of tumbled rock with
other gullies opening into it, and then a cliff built of great tilted
slabs of grey stone.
Kirk pointed to the cliff and started to run, with the yellow girl
beside him. Wind slashed sharp and thin across them. The echoes
whispered like many tongues and Kirk fought them and heard the two
shags come onto the plain behind them, running.
The other three came out of the parallel cut. They came fast, and
because of the curve of the plain they were a little ahead of the two
humans.