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ship.
    She began to stand her hands reaching for the edge of the grave, but from above a huge clawed hand swiped at her face. Jenny shrank back screaming.
    The wolf ’s body was warm and incredibly heavy when it fell on her. She braced herself, expecting to be ripped apart. It took a long moment before she realiz ed the teeth were snarling no longer. The animal was dead.
    She pushed the creature off. Its body was stiffening already. She stared at it - the creature was beyond description; beyond the understanding of her brain. She closed her eyes against the sight and shivered. She felt frozen with fear, and her mind cried for normality and reason in her new world.
    Finally, she hauled herself out. Kneeling and gulping in fresh air, she felt, more than noticed, movement. Looking up sharply, her body geared for flight, she saw the alien. He was unmasked.
    An Indian, was her first thought. A Native American Indian. His hair was long and very black, his face was bare of hair and was dirty; bloodied. His nose was flat, and his cheekbones broad. But it was his eyes that alerted her that he wasn’t a Native American. They were completely black; black, dry orbs in a battered face.
    One side of his face had an ugly thick scar, which ran from the corner of his mouth up to the top of his ear. Part of his bottom lip was missing, revealing several gaps in his lower teeth, which were set in a dark pink gum. Zigzags of scars pitted his jaw and throat. The hands, seen before, were badly scarred as if sometime ago they had fought in a fire. Jenny wondered if that had been the spaceship ’s fire. She looked at the hands again. Empty. Then how did he kill the wolf?
    She moved backwards on her bottom, her eyes never leaving the silent figure of the alien. He secreted a dangerous confidence.
    He regarded her with no expression, then turned and walked away. Jenny ’s hands cupped her mouth, and she breathed deeply. Breathed in the musky stench of the dead body and she sharply removed her hands from her face and looked at them. They were grimy and damp from decomposed alien tissue.
    He rescued me! Her thoughts whirled in her mind.
    Circumstances had brought him to this planet, and somehow he had survived the destruction of his craft. He had made a life here, endured the wolves and the cold. He lived off the land, and had made it his home.
    He could help me. More words, and ones she didn’t care for. The man was an alien, an unknown, unheard-of species from a planet different to hers.
    He looks more human and stable than anything I’ve seen on this cold and dank planet so far. Her inner thoughts were becoming stronger, arguing with the logic of her brain.
    She stood up, her legs shaking, and saw she had stumbled on a graveyard. There were mounds of disturbed earth. She looked in the direction where the alien had disappeared, and a wave of her sympathy followed after him.
    *
    He picked a bunch of green fruit from a tree. The fruit was round, large and soft. He twisted one off its stem, and took a bite. It wasn’t particularly pleasant to eat (better for its juice), but it was the first edible fruit after the winter months. He also knew the human was following, and probably hungry.
    He placed the bunch on the ground and moved away. Behind, he heard her crash through the trees. A smile curved his mouth as he realiz ed she was probably trying to shadow him quietly. The amusement surprised him, and made him realiz e he hadn’t had anything to laugh or smile about for a long time.
    He stopped and leaned against a tree. Obscured by its branches he watched the human without her noticing.
    It took her only a moment to decide to follow him. She kept a safe distance, but stopped with a held breath every time he paused. But he never looked her way, and was seemingly unaware of his secret shadow.
    She watched him pick bunched green fruit high from a tree. It was the same type of tree that she had sheltered in on her first night here, and the fruit had