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without
restriction; and the people visiting were moved through wire tunnels and cages
to see the creatures in something like their natural wild, free states.
    But there was no zoo left when I got
there; only half-timbered country. A time-change line had moved through, taking
out about three miles of highway. The ground was rough, but dry and open. I
coaxed the panel truck across it in low gear, picking as level a route as I
could and doing all right, until I got one rear wheel down into a hole and had
to jack it up to get traction again.
    I needed something firm to rest the
jack base on. I walked into a little patch of woods nearby looking for a piece
of fallen tree limb the right size, and literally stumbled over a leopard.
    He was crouched low on the ground,
head twisted a little sideways and looking up as if cringing from something
large that was about to attack him. Like the squirrel, he was unmoving in that
position when I walked into him—the time storm that had taken out the road and
caught him as well, must have passed only minutes previously. When I stubbed my
toe on his soft flank, he came out of his trance and looked at me. I jumped
back and jerked up the rifle I had had the sense to carry with me.
    But he stepped forward and rubbed
along the side of my upper leg, purring, so much like an overgrown household
pussycat that I could not have brought myself to shoot him, even if I had had
the sense to do so. He was a large young male, weighing a hundred and forty
pounds when I later managed to coax him onto a bathroom scale in an abandoned
hardware store. He rubbed by me, turned and came back to slide up along my
other side, licking at my hands where they held the rifle. And from then on,
like it or not, I had Sunday.
    I had puzzled about him, and the
squirrel, a number of times since. The closest I had come to satisfying my
search for what had made them react as they had, was that being caught by a
time change jarred anything living right back to its infancy. After I first
came to in the cabin—well, I had generally avoided thinking about that. For one
thing I had a job to clean myself up. But I do remember that first, terrible
feeling of helplessness and abandonment—like a very young child lost in a woods
from which he knows he can never find his way out. If someone had turned up
then to hold my hand, I might have reacted just like the squirrel or the
leopard.
    Then there had been our
meeting—Sunday's and mine—with the girl. That had been a different kettle of
fish. For one thing, evidently she had passed the point of initial recovery
from being caught in a time change; but equally evidently, the experience—or
something just before the experience—had hit her a great deal more severely
than my experience with the time change had done.
    But about this time, the stars
started to swim slowly in a circular dance, and I fell asleep.
    I woke with the sun in my eyes,
feeling hot and itchy all over. It was a bright cloudless day, at least a
couple of hours old, since dawn; evidently the tree had shaded me from the
sun's waking me earlier.
    Sunday lay curled within the open
entrance to the tent; but he was all alone. The girl was gone.
     
    6
     
    My first reaction, out of that old,
false, early training of mine, was to worry. Then common sense returned. It
would only be a relief, as far as I was concerned, to have her gone; with her
fits of withdrawal and her pestering Sunday until he, in turn, became a bother.
    Damn it, I thought, let her go.
    But then it occurred to me that
something might have happened to her. It was open country all around us here,
except for a screen of young popple, beyond which there was a small creek. I
went down through the popple and looked across the creek, up over a swelling
expanse of meadow lifting to a near horizon maybe three hundred yards off.
There was nothing to be seen. I went down to look at the creek itself, the
edges of which were muddy and marshy, and found her footprints