But all the flying things he saw were two moth birds of
delicate hues engaging far over the sun-baked rock in one of their
graceful winged dances.
They crossed the heights and came to the inland slope, a drop toward
the central interior plains of the continent. As they plowed through
the high grasses Dalgard knew they were under observation. Hoppers
watched them. And once through a break in a line of trees he saw a
small herd of duocorns race into the shelter of a wood. The presence
of those two-horned creatures, so like the pictures he had seen of
Terran horses, was insurance that the snake-devils did not hunt in
this district, for the swift-footed duocorns were never found within a
day's journey of their archenemies.
Late afternoon faded into the long summer twilight and still Sssuri
kept on. As yet they had come across no traces of Those Others. Here
were none of the domed farm buildings, the monorail tracks, the other
relics one could find about Homeport. This wide-open land could have
been always a wilderness, left to the animals of Astra for their own.
Dalgard speculated upon that, his busy imagination supplying various
reasons for such tract.
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