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forgotten too much in her years away. But Calypso would take care of her: she usually did. And there was just time left to get down to the Assembly Hall.
    Vaulting into the saddle, Kelly kneed Calypso forward, toward the fields leading to the village common. After living on Earth for a time, it was hard to readjust to so few people per square kilometer. By law, there could be only as many Humans as Hrrubans. After the Decision came into effect, more Humans had had to be imported to equal Hrrubans, and four more villages’ worth of Terran colonists — out of the millions applying — had come to Doona/Rrala. Even so, the combined population made little impression on a planet whose diameter was three thousand kilometers greater than that of Earth.
    Kelly was proud that her mother and father were two of the original colonists. Over the quarter century since that historic Treaty, Admiral Sumitral of Alreldep had continued to negotiate with Hrrestan, Hrriss’s father and chief of the Hrruban village elders, to make room for more Humans who wanted to leave overcrowded Earth and more Hrrubans with a similar desire. The talks had been successful, and the population of Doona had increased a thousandfold. Men and women who had lived in cramped, crackerbox-sized apartments on Earth had built homes and ranches in the fertile river valleys and settled down with room to stretch out.
    No limit had actually been set on how much land each settler could claim, so long as waste, pollution, and senseless destruction of resources were avoided. As well as the native urfa, Vic Solinari, who had come to Doona as the storemaster, had elected to raise sheep and goats, his share of the precious breeding stocks sent from Earth. To keep the grasslands healthy, he rotated their pasturage every season to another part of their land. Typically Doonan, he also had a stable of horses, Kelly’s favorite animal as well as cats and dogs.
    It had been four years since Kelly had seen a living animal except Humans and Hrringa, the lonely Hrruban minding the transmitter grid in Alreldep block. Elated and exhilarated, she screeched greetings to a flock of goats milling around in a pen, and sighed with happiness as a cluster of young colts galloped in play across a fenced meadow not far from the house. It was wonderful to be home. Kelly legged Calypso into a canter down the hill toward town, revelling in the rhythmic gait and the joy of being back in the saddle again.

DR. BEN ADJEI had estimated the day this year — and he hadn’t been wrong in twenty years — when the great reptiles would migrate from the salt marshes to the low-lying desert fifty kilometers inland to lay their eggs. Only offworlders bet against him, the local population shrewdly inciting them to do so.
    A Sighter had landed her small copter behind the Reeve ranch house early in the morning to alert Todd that the egg-heavy female snakes were arriving in the desert and beginning to burrow into the dunes. Immediately, Todd called a meeting of leaders of the Hunt at the colony Assembly Hall. They had gathered from all over Doona and had been staying in or around First Village for the last few days, in case Ben Adjei’s estimate was off a bit.
    For the past fifteen years, Todd and Hrriss had been in the first line of Hunters. Their rapport was instinctive: they seemed to read each other’s mind. They never took unnecessary chances or risked lives, theirs or others. Their impressive tally of kills and captures of the dangerous reptiloids had reached legendary totals. As they grew to an age when their parents would permit it, they came to lead the Hunt and had done so now for ten years.
    “You could see them in the underbrush, swarming toward the sands,” Lois Unterberger informed the leaders who had congregated at the Reeve residence, the usual Hunt headquarters. Excitement made her brown eyes wide, showing white all around the irises. Her dark hair was intricately braided and pinned tightly to