back. When his face nuzzled the leaves, bean rows sprang higher than a man, leghorns were scratching everywhere and the spacemen came with bright sheaves of credits in their fists. The bean rows spread beyond the horizon and the dust of plowing tractors rose like smoke against the sky, while Paul and Harry, hardly distinguishable, for Paul was only three minutes older, proudly led a ragged old man and a slack-jawed captain through the flowering avenue of peach trees.

"Now you must meet my wife," said Paul, and he squirmed uncomfortably on the leaves.

He awoke bolt upright with his automatic pointing. Wind? Of course. He repeated the thought as he circled the hill on the double. A chip of damp leaves, dark side up with alien things dragging their larvae from the sun, down the slope another, he pursued scars in the leaves over the hill, down, lost the trail in the dry watercourse, zig-zagging, circling like a hound dog, found it again. Ran. His leg muscles were soft from months without gravity. Steep hills. Rollercoasters. Winded.

Resting, listening to his heart, listening, smiling: the mouse was not the largest fauna in his private world. Doubtless the thing that ran like a man was hills and valleys ahead, a world to hide in. As he trudged back to the shed he was not afraid, his heart was thumping, a-hunting we will go.

He was listening and watching the hills while he strung the electric fence to keep out the mice. He was listening while he cleaned out a room in the old supply shed. He listened in his sleep, even after he had stretched alarm trip wires crisscross beneath the leaves and planted nooses with the sliding catch deer poachers use. Although he did not expect to hold the thing, since it surely would have more intelligence than a deer, he might get a look at it, a flick of time in which he could decide whether to shoot.

The snares worked as he was sometimes to think afterward too well. The afternoon he charged into a world of shrieks and crashing leaves and saw a bronzed, hair-whirling fury, her leaf-clotted mane glinted blue in the sunlight, straining from the humming wire with the self-destroying terror of a filly trapped in a cattle guard, he stared, then ran for the wire snips. When he cautiously approached he saw the wire had bitten deep into her ankle. As she squawled, she was beating the leaves with blood. It would be many afternoons before she would run again, if ever. If he loosed this lone thing now, she would die.Once, on Mars, he shot a sand lizard that wriggled into a crevasse and would take a 

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