Hiero peeled a small amount of the covering off with his fingers, but whenever he met any resistance, let it alone. He and Klootz both knew how much help was needed and when to stop, for it had been six full seasons since they had chosen each other at the great annual calf roundup. Hiero next got out a small steel mirror and touched up his face, shaving more carefully and repainting his rank badges, now almost obliterated. This done, he repacked.
Soon they were swinging along up the edge of the beach, Hiero in the saddle and the bear lumbering over the hard-packed sand and shingle out in front. It was not long before they came upon signs that they were back in lands used by humans.
From a pile of riprap, sticks, and dried weed, which lay on the shore in a little cover, a polished human skull looked blankly up at Hiero. He dismounted and examined it thoughtfully. There was a gaping hole in the occipital region, and a few faint shreds of dried tissue there indicated the thing to be not too old. He put it down reverently and, mounting, rode on. It might be an accident, indeed there were a thousand ways of accounting for its appearance, but why a fairly fresh skull and no body at all, not even one bone? That hole looked as if something (or someone) had gone after the brains. He suppressed a grimace and said a one-line prayer for the repose of the skull’s owner, assuming charitably that the man (or woman) had been a Christian.
They rested briefly at noon in the shade of a large, leaning tree of a variety new to Hiero. He recognized it as a palm of some unknown type from pictures he had seen and realized that winter could hardly be too severe in these parts if such a plant could endure it. The scrub palmettos of the Taig were able to grow only through buried trunks. He must be even further south than he had realized.
During the still heat of early afternoon they had one encounter with a foe, but it passed off without doing any harm. Rounding a shoulder of rock, and actually in shallow water, since the beach had briefly disappeared, they suddenly found a large, black-spotted, yellow cat tearing at a carcass on the next patch of open sand.
The big cat raised bloody fangs and snarled in angry warning.
Go! Suddenly deciding to test something, Hiero used a bolt from his new armory of mental weapons. Leave! Out of our way or you will die!
The animal cringed as if hit a blow by a stick. Its ears flattened, and emitting a frightened “miaow,” like a vast kitten which had been spanked, it left the beach in one huge bound and vanished into the dunes in a second. Hiero was thunderstruck at his own success and then burst into laughter.
