The party tracked the Mastodon Men in silence. The path was so easy to follow that they did not need to watch the ground. Instead they watched the trees and brush. The Mastodon Men would be resting in their band, asleep in a bed of ferns, possibly lying under the shadow of a fallen redwood, and perhaps only one or two drowsy youngsters would be awake, ready to howl in warning if they scented a razor cat.

Fear churned Tull's belly, constricted his breathing, like the snake that crushes its prey. He could not forget the musky scent of their hair, the smell of rotten meat that issued from them. Unlike some predators, Mastodon Men were not fastidious, and the odor of dried blood and rotting fat had been strong. To Tull, the fear now seemed fascinating. When he first saw the Mastodon Man, he feared it because it had reminded him of his father. But as Phylomon had said, his brain worked its magic after several hours, and he found that he was terrified of the beast itself.

At noon, they discovered their barrel sitting on the side of the hill deep in a bed of sword ferns. For a while, the men moved toward it slowly, fearing that they had found the camp of the Mastodon Men. Tull crept toward the barrel first. He felt the hair rise on his forehead, felt pimples of fear sprout on his arms.

They circled the barrel but found it empty except for a single tuft of brown hair.

In the early afternoon, the men entered a shallow valley, thick with wild grapes. The leaves were waxy and rigid, dried and lifeless after the heat of late summer. The men could not walk through the valley without making a sound of paper shredding.

At the north end was a steep hill. The redwoods marched up to the top of a small ridge, and there they stopped. Snail Follower's bloody path led straight for the rise several hundred yards away.

"If Snail Follower survived the fall, his legs will be broken," Phylomon said. "I believe we will find our quarry dining on him, there on the other side of the ridge."

Phylomon urged the others to stay behind, and then crept up the ridge alone, moving his feet so slowly that the wild grape leaves did not rustle as they slid over his naked legs. Even Ayuvah could not have crept so silently. Phylomon reached the top of the rise, then dropped to his hands and knees and crawled to the lip of the ridge.

He watched for five minutes, and slowly returned through the grape.

To Tull, it seemed that the sky grew darker. The air thickened with the sense of impending doom. He tried to shake off his fear, to remind himself that he had lived through the first attack by the Mastodon Men, but it did no good. His tongue dried and seemed to swell.

"Snail Follower is dead," Phylomon said when he returned. "Let's go."

Ayuvah sighed in relief.

"Dead?" Tull asked in disbelief. "Are you sure?"

"The Mastodon Men have got most of the carcass stripped of meat," Phylomon said. "They have a good thirty or forty in their band."

"What should we do?" Tull asked.

Phylomon arched a single hairless brow. "Do? Why leave, of course!"

Phylomon turned to go, and Ayuvah followed. Tull stood momentarily, stunned. Phylomon was right after all.

The Mastodon Men were dumb animals, incapable of recognizing their common ancestry to man. When they'd killed Little Chaa, they were not eating a fellow being, they were just eating an animal—the way Tull would eat a pig or a grouse.

Yet Tull wanted to punish them, wanted Phylomon and Ayuvah to run over the cliff with him, descend on the Mastodon Men, and slaughter them down to the last child. The very thought was madness. They had nothing to gain by attacking. But I have something to gain, Tull thought.

In a subtle way, kwea ruled the Pwi. If two men were angry at one another with a great wrath, then they said, "Kwea will not let us live in peace." If the tribe was lucky, the two could find a way to reconcile that was powerful enough so that the kwea of anger would be swallowed up forever in the kwea of friendship. In the same way, Tull realized that if he did not slay the Mastodon Men, the kwea of fear would rule him, would forever make him a slave.

Tull watched Phylomon lead Ayuvah quietly back through the forest. Ayuvah turned, the muscles bunching on his thick neck as he looked over his shoulder, and gauged Tull. "You must kill them?" he asked.

Tull's mouth became even drier; he wanted to kill the Mastodon Men, but he said only, "I must look upon them." His legs were shaking, and he tried to hold them steady.

Phylomon stopped and turned.

Ayuvah said, "Brother, I will come with you."

"No," Tull said. "I already saw one friend die. I do not want to see another."

"Evil kwea is upon me, too," Ayuvah said. "Although I do not fear them as much as you, I must come."

Tull grunted his assent, hefted his spear. He untied his belt and peed on a bush.

Blood was pounding in his ears, and he thought of the sickening thud he had heard when the Mastodon Man had slapped Little Chaa, the sound of a body sliding through grass.

Phylomon said, "Look quickly, while you've got plenty of daylight. If they catch wind of you, head for open country where the sunlight will blind them. Always approach them from downwind. If one spots you and charges while raising his arms, it is a ceremonial charge. Back off slowly.

"But if he charges you and comes in low with his shoulder forward, he means to kill you. I'll go back and start pushing the barrel to camp."

While Phylomon disappeared into the redwoods, Tull and Ayuvah circled the brow of the hill, heading into the forest where the shadows were deep enough so that no wild grapes grew.

When they rounded the hill, Tull found a gentle incline leading down. The foliage was thick near the ground. Because wild pigs would not eat the sour grapes in the area, the grapes had grown dense. But at eye level, the elk and deer had eaten the lower leaves of the vine maple and alder.

By looking down the slope, Tull could see Snail Follower, that giant old bull, lying on his side, gaping from a dozen wounds. The Mastodon Men had opened his belly, feeding on the liver and stomach, and white entrails had been pulled a dozen yards from the corpse. Just beyond the kill, the Mastodon Men lay sprawled in the grass beneath the trees, giant apelike beings with little body hair except on the shoulders and chest, and the long wispy manes that covered their heads. Only two juveniles seemed to be awake. One female wore the dark-yellow fur of a child and was so hairless that she almost appeared human. She sat and fondled her right nipple, pinched at a tick or a flea, then stopped and leaned back her head to taste the air through broad nostrils.

The second juvenile, a short male whose fur had turned the darker brown of adulthood, ripped at branches and stuffed them in his teeth as he paced through the foliage, then grunted softly as if challenging older males to combat. His forehead held a higher peak than that of others of his kind, and his eyes were sunk deeper. Once, Ayuvah stepped on a twig, and the young male turned. His gaze seemed to pierce them for a moment.

Tull watched the adults sprawled on the ground for several minutes, studying their faces, trying to decide which one had eaten Little Chaa. His throat tightened, and blood pounded in his ears as he considered how he might be able to steal into the group, put a spear through the heart of the culprit. But after several minutes, he still could not see his target.

At two hundred yards, Tull motioned for Ayuvah to wait where he was. Then Tull crept forward on his knees. He pushed his shield ahead of him, not because it would ward a blow from a Mastodon Man, but because the rust and avocado camouflage painted over it offered some hope of concealment.

Tull inched forward, brushing twigs and dead leaves from his path so he would not stumble over them, always holding his shield as steady as possible so that his movement would not attract attention. His heart hammered in his ears, and he found it difficult to believe that the Mastodon Men were unaware of him, could not smell the terror in his sweat. He did not feel the kwea of terror, where horrific memories are stirred and surface like bones in a pot of stew. It was a more controlled and logical terror, the fear one feels when, in a calculated manner, one does something undeniably stupid.

When he was a hundred and fifty yards from the camp, the young bull Mastodon Man abruptly stood and grunted a battle challenge, raising his hands above his head as if to fight. Several older bulls raised their heads from sleep. Tull was close enough to smell them strongly now, the sweat, the dried blood, the putrid fat. Snail Follower's corpse lay not fifty yards away, and a cloud of bluebottle flies and yellow jackets had swarmed to the kill, humming softly.