found himself partly up, with the scrambling shapes cascading off him; but he was dizzy, his vision blurred. Another stab of the tiny weapon came. It struck him on the forehead, a hot stinging, tingling flash. For an instant it clung, with a wave of dizziness from it flooding Nixon so that he fell back, kicking, writhing.... They were tramping over his face now. Then he realized that one of them was pounding with something heavy at his temple, a rhythmic pounding.... Thump.... Thump.... He tried to strike at it.... But now he knew that he couldn't focus.... The pounding stopped. Of course. He had knocked the damned thing off.... Thump.... Thump.... Another had started it again, every little blow making Nixon's head shudder, his senses reel and fade, so that now a dull blurred blackness was coming.... Those cursed, tiny little blows at his temple.

Suddenly, strange in Nixon's thoughts there was the vision of himself, a monstrous fallen, wounded giant. Bewildered, dazed, helpless, with a man standing on the great expanse of his face; a man who was pounding with a crowbar against the softness of the giant's temple.... You could fight a 'gator. Sure. You could fight a man your own size. Or several of them maybe, with your fingers itching to get at their throats and strangle them.... But there were these jabbing, swarming things by the hundreds....

There was in Nixon's fading mind at last only the damnable realization of those tiny rhythmic blows at his temple, each just that small concussion of his brain, another and another until his senses fully faded and he was swept off into the dark, empty, soundless abyss of unconsciousness....

II

It was like the roaring of a waterfall. You could lie near it on the grassy sward and maybe there would be a little last fading sunlight of the day to warm you. And your belly could be empty with a gnawing pain, but that was all right because there was the smell of food cooking and soon you would have it full. A warrior returned from the hunt, had his women to cook for him....

The phantasmagoria of Nixon's returning consciousness as he listened to the roaring of the falling water seemed made up of queer things out of his Indian heritage. But another part of his brain told him that was absurd—told him that he was lying on something hard, with the feel of sweat bathing his skin, and pain that slowly was becoming apparent stabbing at him from scores of tiny wounds on his hands, his face, his neck.

Then suddenly Nixon knew that he had opened his 

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