That made them fearful, even though they ate the offered gifts just as though they had caught it themselves. But they started to post sentries through the night. At first they were drowsing youths, and I managed to slip past them easily enough. Then a few of the adult men stood guard, but it was a rare night when they stayed alert enough to prevent me from leaving a gift near the smoldering campfire.

Gradually I began to let them see me, but always at a distance. I would hold a fowl in my upraised hand or carry a young buck across my shoulders. They would huddle together and stare at me in awe. In the dark of night I would sneak in close enough to their crackling fire to listen to their talk, and before morning streaked the sky, I would leave the prize that they had seen me with the previous day.

Soon enough they turned me into a legend. Orion was eleven feet tall. His eyes darted flame. He could leap across rivers and stop spears in midair merely by glancing at them with his fierce countenance. He was a mighty hunter who could bring down a mastadon single-handedly.

Their talk of mastadons intrigued me. Apparently the clans came together, later in the year, and hunted down truly big game together. The elders — who may have been all of thirty-five years, or even forty — told tales of grand hunts where they chased entire herds of mighty tusked behemoths over the edge of a cliff and then feasted on their carcasses to bursting.

I listened also to the names they called themselves, and I learned that the red-bearded leader was Dal and the teen-ager with the cracking voice was Kralo. The woman I had loved in other times was known as Ava — and she was Dal’s woman, I soon realized. That hurt. For days I wandered away from the clan, feeling alone and betrayed by a woman who had none of the memories I had, whose only sight of me had been that first day when I had surprised and terrified the entire clan. What did you expect? I raged at myself. These savages don’t have the time or the resources to allow women to go unmated. Did you think she would wait for your arrival? She didn’t even know you existed until a few weeks ago. Even now she thinks you are a demon or a god, not a man who loves her and wants to possess her.

Still I moped and sulked, filled with self-pity and a smoldering anger at Ormazd, who could put me into this situation without a thought about my feelings.

After three days away from them spent nursing my aching heart, I realized that I was not doing myself or them any good. I decided to return to the task that had been set before me. In truth, there was nothing else that I could do. I was a pawn in Ormazd’s game, and the emotions of a pawn are not important to the chess master.

I sneaked back to their camp that night and listened to them asking themselves why the mighty Orion had abandoned them. What had they done to offend the great hunter? It took all my self-control to keep from laughing. How quickly the miraculous becomes common-place! The gifts of food that had frightened them, at first, they now considered quite normal. It was the absence of the formerly wonderful gifts that troubled them.

I decided to give them a real gift. First I thought back to the marches they made each day, the distances between one night’s camp and the next. They were obviously moving through this springtime with a definite objective in mind. I calculated where they would camp two days hence and made for that spot. To my pleasure, I saw that the area I arrived at had obviously been used as a campsite before: beside a shallow, swiftly gurgling brook there was a patch of earth already blackened by the fires of countless earlier camps and a mound of weathered bones where they had tossed their garbage.

I spent that night and all the next day really hunting. With my rickety bow and with a sling I had devised for throwing rocks, I amassed a huge pile of slain meat for the clan: rabbits, birds, deer, even a succulent young boar. I left the food at the intended campsite, spending almost as much time defending the cache against wild dogs and other scavengers as I did in hunting down more game.

The dogs were my biggest difficulty. These were not the half-tamed companions of the humans; they were more like wolves than pets. They were ferocious and intelligent. They hunted in packs, and they would have dragged me down and killed me if I had not been fast enough and smart enough to outwit them. I hated to do it, but I had to kill several of them before they finally gave up on my horde and left the area.

I guarded the cache of meat through that long night and most of the following day. Finally, as the late afternoon shadows lengthened toward sunset, I saw the vanguard of the clan approaching from over the grassy horizon two of the teen-agers whom Dal often sent out ahead of the rest. I splashed across the rushing brook and hid in the foliage on its other side.

The boys saw the pile of game first and began leaping into the air and yelling madly. The rest of the clan hurried toward them, gaped, and then ran for the campsite. They were ecstatic. Never had they seen so much food in one place before. They gathered around the cache, swishing their hands through the air to shoo off the flies, and simply stared in awe at the pile of meat.

From my hiding place in the bushes I heard their leader, Dal, say gravely, “Only Orion could have done this.”

“Can it be all for us?” Ava asked.

“We are his people,” replied Dal. “This has been our clan’s camp since before even old Makar can remember. It is Orion’s gift to us. He has returned to his people. He is no longer angry at us.”

I let them build their fire and settle down to feasting as the evening slowly pulled its violet blanket over the cloudless sky. I slipped away, went upwind along the bank of the stream, and where it eddied into a wide pool, I saw a fine solitary stag dipping his antlered head to drink.

Unlimbering my bow, I slowly walked toward the stag. It saw me, but it was so unused to humans that it allowed me to get within deadly range of it. I felled it with a single shot through the neck, then slit its throat swiftly and cleanly with my stone knife. I felt a twinge of conscience, the memory of a later century when human hunters stalked such beautiful animals for sport, not for food. With a determined shake of my head, I lifted the carcass onto my shoulders and headed back toward the clan’s camp. It was heavy, and I walked slowly, carefully, through the gathering dusk.

Just as the first star showed itself in the dark sky, I stepped into the flickering light of the clan’s camp with the stag across my shoulders. They were still eating, stuffing themselves as only people accustomed to long hunger can do, their fingers and faces greasy with meat, the campfire blazing hot and shining in their eyes.

I stepped into their midst and dropped the stag with a heavy thunk at Dal’s feet.

No one spoke a syllable. For several moments the only sound was the hissing of spitted meat burning on the fire.

“It is me,” I said at last. “Orion. I bring you another gift.”

They were victims of their own propaganda. They had puffed up their stories about me so far out of proportion that now they seemed terrified of my presence. None of them moved. Their faces were rigid with fear and surprise. They probably expected me to strike them with lightning, or something equally drastic, I suppose.

Ava recovered her wits before any of the others. Rising slowly to her feet, she extended both her arms toward me.

“We thank you, O mighty Orion. What can we do to show our gratitude?”

She was filthy, her face and hands stained with the bloody, charred meat she had been eating. But in the firelight I saw the calm gray eyes that I had known and loved in other eras, and it took all my self-control not to clasp her in my arms.