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the vegetation burst into leaf and bud and bloom, quickly, for its growth instincts knew in their mindless way how short was the time to grow and reproduce before the brown death of summer came. The prowlers were suddenly gone one day, to follow the spring north, and for a week men could walk and work outside the stockade without the protection of armed guards.
    Then the new peril appeared, the one they had not expected: the unicorns.
    The stockade wall was a blue-black rectangle behind them and the blue star burned with the brilliance of a dozen moons, lighting the woods in blue shadow and azure light. Prentiss and the hunter walked a little in front of the two riflemen, winding to keep in the starlit glades.
    "It was on the other side of the next grove of trees," the hunter said in a low voice. "Fred was getting ready to bring in the rest of the woods goats. He shouldn't have been more than ten minutes behind me—and it's been over an hour."
    They rounded the grove of trees. At first it seemed there was nothing before them but the empty, grassy glade. Then they saw it lying on the ground no more than twenty feet in front of them.
    It was—it had been—a man. He was broken and stamped into hideous shapelessness and something had torn off his arms.
    For a moment there was dead silence, then the hunter whispered, " What did that? "
    The answer came in a savage, squealing scream and the pound of cloven hooves. A formless shadow beside the trees materialized into a monstrous charging bulk; a thing like a gigantic gray bull, eight feet tall at the shoulders, with the tusked, snarling head of a boar and the starlight glinting along the curving, vicious length of its single horn.
    " Unicorn! " Prentiss said, and jerked up his rifle.
    The rifles cracked in a ragged volley. The unicorn squealed in fury and struck the hunter, catching him on its horn and hurling him thirty feet. One of the riflemen went down under the unicorn's hooves, his cry ending almost as soon as it began.
    The unicorn ripped the sod in deep furrows as it whirled back to Prentiss and the remaining rifleman; not turning in the manner of four-footed beasts of Earth but rearing and spinning on its hind feet. It towered above them as it whirled, the tip of its horn fifteen feet above the ground and its hooves swinging around like great clubs.
    Prentiss shot again, his sights on what he hoped would be a vital area, and the rifleman shot an instant later.
    The shots went true. The unicorn's swing brought it on around but it collapsed, falling to the ground with jarring heaviness.
    "We got it!" the rifleman said. "We—"
    It half scrambled to its feet and made a noise; a call that went out through the night like the blast of a mighty trumpet. Then it dropped back to the ground, to die while its call was still echoing from the nearer hills.
    From the east came an answering trumpet blast; a trumpeting that was sounded again from the south and from the north. Then there came a low and muffled drumming, like the pounding of thousands of hooves.
    The rifleman's face was blue-white in the starlight. "The others are coming—we'll have to run for it!"
    He turned, and began to run toward the distant bulk of the stockade.
    "No!" Prentiss commanded, quick and harsh. "Not the stockade!"
    The rifleman kept running, seeming not to hear him in his panic. Prentiss called to him once more:
    "Not the stockade—you'll lead the unicorns into it!"
    Again the rifleman seemed not to hear him.
    The unicorns were coming in sight, converging in from the north and east and south, the rumble of their hooves swelling to a thunder that filled the night. The rifleman would reach the stockade only a little ahead of them and they would go through the wall as though it had been made of paper.
    For a while the area inside the stockade would be filled with dust, with the squealing of the swirling, charging unicorns and the screams of the dying. Those inside the stockade would have no chance whatever