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decision. Whichever direction we looked in, nothing but bleak disaster appeared. Finally, as the first rays of the new day began to brighten the sky, Anya stretched out on the deer hide and closed her eyes in troubled, exhausted sleep. I sat at the cave's entrance, my back against the stubborn stone, my eyes scanning the wooded, rock-strewn floor of the canyon. I could see out to the smooth-flowing river and a little beyond it. Any enemy approaching us could be easily spotted from up here. Any noise was amplified and echoed by the natural sounding board of the hollowed rock cliff.
    The lurid brownish red star hung in the morning sky despite the sun's radiance. Somehow it made my blood run cold; the star did not belong there. It was intrusion in the heavens, a signal that things were not as they should be.
    I saw Noch and the others stirring. Noch was actually getting muscular. His arms and chest had thickened. He held his chin high. Even scrawny Reeva had filled out enough to begin looking somewhat attractive. The welts on her back were fading blue-black bruises now.
    Scrambling down the steep rocky slope to the canyon floor, I caught up with Noch on his way to the stream. His head barely reached my shoulder's height, and he had to squint up into the morning sunlight to speak to me. But the old servility had disappeared.
    Side by side we went to the stream and urinated into its muddy bank. Equals in that, at least.
    "Do we hunt again today?" Noch asked.
    I replied, "What do you think? Should we go out?"
    "There's still a fair amount of meat from the goat we caught yesterday," he said, tugging at his unkempt beard, "but on the way back home I saw the tracks of a big animal in the mud by the bank of the stream. Tracks like we've never seen before."
    He showed me. They were the prints of a bear, a large one, and I told him I thought it would be wise to keep away from such a beast. From the size of the prints, it was a cave bear that stood more than seven feet tall on its hind legs. The massive paws that made those prints could break a man's back with a single swipe. I described what a bear looks like, how ferocious it could be, how dangerous it was to tangle with one.
    To my surprise, my words only excited Noch. He became eager to track down the bear.
    "We could kill it!" he said. "All of us men, working together. We could track it down and kill it."
    "But why?" I asked. "Why risk the danger?"
    Noch pulled at his beard again, struggling to find the words he wanted. I thought I knew what was going through his mind: he wanted to kill the bear to prove to himself—and to the women—that he was a mighty hunter. The king of the forest.
    But what he said was, "If this beast is as dangerous as you say, Orion, might it not come to our caves in the night and attack us? It could be more of a danger not to kill it than to hunt it down."
    I grinned at him as we stood by the stream's muddy bank. He was thinking for himself, his slavish docility replaced now by the spirit of a hunter. Perhaps he could even become a leader of men.
    Then a new thought struck me. Could this bear be a weapon sent against us by Set? A huge cave bear could kill half our little band or more if it struck suddenly in the night.
    "You're right," I said. "Round up all the men and we'll track the beast down."
    The eight males of the little band came with me, each of them carrying a couple of rough spears. I had a bow slung across my shoulders and a half-dozen arrows tied in a sheaf on my back. Several of the men had crude flint knives, nothing more than sickle-shaped chunks of flint sized to fit in the palm, one edge sharpened. Anya had wanted to come with us, but I begged her to stay with the women and not upset the precarious division of labor that we had so recently established.
    "Very well," she said, with an unhappy toss of her head. "I will stay here with the women while you have all the fun."
    "Keep a sharp lookout," I warned. "This bear might be merely a