They rested that night, feeling better — if a bit guilty — with the change in diet. The next morning they marched just one arrowflight east to face a mighty ravine, with sheer walls and a raging torrent in its heart.

Dwer headed upstream while Lena struck off to the south, leaving Jenin and Danel to wait with the exhausted donkeys. Two days out and two back, that was the agreed limit. If neither scout found a way by then, they might have to make a raft and try the rapids. Not a prospect Dwer relished.

Didn’t I tell Danel we should wait for Rety? I may be a tracker, but she came out through this desolation all by herself.

More than ever he was impressed by the girl’s un-swayable tenacity.

If there is a second party, and she’s with them, Rety’s probably chortling over me falling into this trap. If she knows some secret shortcut, they may reach the tribe before us. Now won’t that screw up Danel’s plans!

Even moving parallel with the river was awkward and dangerous, a struggle up steep bluffs, then back down the slippery bank of one icy tributary after another. To Dwer’s surprise, Mudfoot came along, forsaking DanePs campfire and Jenin’s pampering attention. The trek was too hard for any of the noor’s standard antics, ambushing Dwer or trying to trip him. After a while, they even began helping each other. He carried the noor across treacherous, foamy creeks. At other times, Mudfoot sped ahead to report with squeals and quivers which of two paths seemed better.

Still, the river and its canyon tormented them, appearing almost to open up, then abruptly closing again, narrower and steeper than before. By noon of the second day, Dwer was muttering sourly over the obstinate nastiness of the terrain. Fallon warned me about the Gray Hills. But I always figured I’d get to go through the old man’s notes and maps. Pick a path based on the trips of earlier hunters.

Yet none of them had ever found any trace of Rety’s band, so maybe they relied too much on each other’s advice, repeatedly taking the same route in and out of these badlands. A route the sooners knew to avoid. Maybe all this horrid inaccessibility meant Danel’s group was getting near the tribe’s home base.

That’s it, boy. Keep thinkin’ that way, if it makes you feel better.

Wouldn’t it be great to struggle all this way, and back, only to learn that Lena had already found a good crossing, just a little ways downstream? That thought tortured Dwer as he shared food with Mudfoot. Going on seemed futile, and he’d have to call the trip a loss in a few hours anyway. Dwer’s fingers and toes ached, along with overstrained tendons across his back and legs. But it was the pounding roar of rushing water that really wore away at him, as if a clock teet had been hammering inside his head for days.

“Do you think we oughta head back?” he asked the noor.

Mudfoot cocked its sleek head, giving Dwer that deceptively intelligent expression, reminding him of legends .that said the beasts could grant wishes — if you wanted something so bad, you didn’t care about the cost. Workmen used the expression “Let’s consult a noor” to mean a problem couldn’t be solved, and it was time to soften frustration with a set of stiff drinks.

“Well,” Dwer sighed, hoisting his pack and bow, “I don’t guess it’d hurt to go on a ways. I’d feel silly if it turned out we missed a good ford just over the next rise.”

Thirty duras later, Dwer crawled up a thorny bank, cursing the brambles and the slippery wetness that soaked his skin, wishing he was on his way back to a hot meal and a dry blanket. Finally, he reached a place to stand, sucking an oozing scratch across the back of his hand.

He turned — and stared through a mist at what lay ahead.

A crashing waterfall, whose roar had been masked by the turbulent river, stretched low and wide from far to the left all the way to the distant right. A wide curtain of spray and foam.

Yet that was not what made Dwer gape.

Just before the roaring plummet, traversing the river from bank to bank, lay a broad expanse of rocky shallows that appeared nowhere more than ankle deep.

“I guess this settles the question of whether or not to pro-ceed” He sighed.

Shortly, he and Mudfoot stood at last on the other shore, having sloshed easily across to prove the ford was safe. From there an obvious game trail zigzagged through the forest, departing the canyon eastward.

On my way back downstream I’ll scout an easier path for Danel and the others to get up here. Success took much of the sting out of his aches and pains. There’s a chance Lena beat me to a way across. Still, I found this place, and maybe I’m the first! If all this stupid alien stuff blows over and we get to go home, I’ll check Fallon’s maps to see if anyone’s named this spot since the Buyur went away.

The broad falls reminded him of the spillway back at Dolo Village, a thought that was sweet, but also a bitter reminder of why he was here, so far from Sara and everyone else he loved.

I’m here to survive. It’s my job to cower and have babies with women I barely know, while those on the Slope suffer and die.

The pleasure of discovery evaporated. Shame he displaced with a wooden determination to do the job he had been commanded to do. Dwer started to head back across the shallows… then paused in his tracks, acutely aware of a tickling sensation in the middle of his back.

Something was wrong.

Frowning, he slipped off the bow and drew the string-tightening lever. With an arrow nocked, he flared his nostrils to suck humid air. It was hard to make out anything in the musty dankness. But judging from Mudfoot’s arched spines, the noor felt it too.

Someone’s here, he thought, moving swiftly inland to get under the first rank of trees. Or was here, recently.

Away from the shore, the place stank with a terrible muddle of scents, which was natural next to the only river crossing for many leagues. Animals would come to drink, then leave territorial markings. But Dwer sensed something else, inserting a wary hint of threat.

Painfully aware that open water lay at his back, he moved deeper into the forest.

I smell… burnt wood — someone had a fire, not too long ago.

He scanned. Sniffing and peering.

It was over… there.

Amid the shadows, half a stone’s throw away, he made out the remnants, set in a modest clearing. A large pit of black ashes.

Some of Rety’s band? He worried. Might Jass and Bom be watching right now, picking their best shot at an intruder from the dreaded west?

Clues lay in the brushing rustle of wind in the branches, the furtive movements of insects and birds. But this terrain and wildlife were strange to him, and the racket from the waterfall would drown out a militia company on maneuvers.

Mudfoot made a low chuffing growl and sniffed close to the ground while Dwer scanned the complex dimness beyond the next rank of trees. “What is it?” he asked, kneeling where Mudfoot scratched a layer of freshly fallen leaves.

A familiar odor struck him fully.

“Donkey shit?”

He risked a quick glance — and didn’t need a second look.

Donkeys? But Rety said the sooners didn’t have any!

With dark-adapting eyes he now picked out traces of pack beasts all over the clearing. Hoofprints and droppings from at least a dozen animals. A stake where a remuda line was tethered. Flattened spots where cargo carriers must have lain.

He lowered the bow. So a second expedition had set out, passing the first by a better route, no doubt led by Rety herself.

Well, at least we won’t be quite so outnumbered by the sooners, even if contact doesn’t happen in the order Danel planned.