The Game of Stars and Comets Read Online Free PDF

pinkish meat tasted better yet.
    The Terran was alert to every sign of animal or bird life about them, making notes on his wrist recorder of two species of grazers they had sighted that morning, one equipped with a nose horn, the other apparently without any form of defense except fleetness. There were rodent things in the grass, and a flightless, feathered bird as fleet as the grazer but twice its size, which Kade was glad had not tried to dispute their passage. The spurs on its huge feet had been warning of a belligerent nature and, when it had opened its bill to squawk at them, he was certain he had sighted serrations like teeth set along the edges there.
    But the impression remained that this was a rich game land not overcrowded with inhabitants. The Styor hunted some for sport, the lurkers for food, neither of them making big inroads on the native game. How true that was Kade learned a couple of hours later when they had made their way into the heights.
    They had lingered for a breather on the top of a ridge, and ahead was a drift of mist—no, dust rising. Lik turned and two of the Ikkinni hastily moved to give him free passage.
    "We stay."
    "What is it?'
    "One of the big herds of kwitu making the spring passage."
    Kwitu, the horn-nosed creatures. But hundreds, thousands of them would have to be on the move to raise such a cloud as that. Lik sat down on a convenient ledge.
    "They pass from south to north with the seasons. Sometimes it takes two days for a big herd to get through a gap." He watched the cloud of dust through narrowed eyes. "They head now for the Slit." His fingers went to his control box. Iskug, at the other end of the line of natives gave a convulsive jerk, his hands rising toward his collared throat, but he made no outcry in answer to that unnecessarily brutal summons.
    Kade's hand balled into a fist, until he saw Lik's sly amusement spark in his yellow, reptilian eyes. Watch out! Lik might just double his collar pull for the pleasure of making the Terran show useless resentment. Kade's fingers relaxed, he brushed his hand across his hide field breeches, removing a smear of rock dust.
    "There is a way into the mountains." Lik was not asking a question of the chief hunter, he was stating a fact. Iskug had better answer in the affirmative or suffer consequences.
    "Such a one climbs high," the native's voice was husky.
    "Then we climb high." Lik mimicked the Ikkinni. "And at once." He added an unprintable emphasis, but he did not give his guide a second collar jolt.
    They did climb, from the back of the ridge, up a higher crown, and then by a series of ledges and rough breaks to the first slope of a mountain. The cloud of dust still hung heavy to the east and Kade thought that now and again the wind brought them a low mutter of sound, the bawling of the kwitu, the clamor of countless numbers of three split hooves pounding along the same ribbon of ground.
    Close to sundown the hunting party reached a plateau where a stunted vegetation held tenaciously against the pull of the mountain winds to afford a pocket of shelter as a spring. Kade, kneeling beside the small pool that spring fed, was startled when he raised his eyes to the rock surface facing him. Carved there in deeply incised strokes into which paint had been long ago splashed, was the life-size representation of a kwitu, its broad nose-horned head bent until the pits which marked the nostrils were just above the surface of the lapping water. The unknown artist, and he had been truly an artist of great ability, had so poised his subject that the kwitu was visibly drinking from the lost mountain pool.
    Kade sat back on his heels, held up his wrist so that he could catch the image, as it was now suitably lighted by the setting sun, on the lens of his picture recorder. Surely this was not Styor work; the aging and erosion of the stone on which it had been carved argued a long period of time, maybe centuries, since the figure had been completed. Yet who