The plant life he found in the mountains wasn't much. There were a few dry, hard bristly bushes, and a tough, gray-green growth that clung to the rocks—a mosslike lichen or a lichenlike moss, take your pick. Neither looked in the least edible.

So Hale headed down the mountains toward the south.

Some days later, as he approached the foothills, he found queer-looking bushes that bore purple berrylike things on their branches. He opened one, and, to his disgust, a white, wormlike thing writhed and squirmed in his hand until he crushed it and wiped his palms on a rock. Every berry he opened behaved the same way. He decided they were none too savory a fare.

He came at last to a warm sea near the foothills of the mountain range. The crags almost seemed to rise out of the water. Hale couldn't see across the body of water, but he knew what its shape was, having seen it from high altitude when he came in for a landing. It was actually a wide channel that cut off a large island from the mainland on which he stood. He narrowed his eyes at the horizon and fancied he could see a shadow of the island, but common sense told him it was an illusion; the island was at least forty miles away.

The water of the channel was quite warm—Hale estimated it at about seventy degrees—and filled with life. Each wave that surged up to the shore left wriggling things behind it as it retreated, and ugly, many-legged things scuttled across the pale blue sand.

It was the blue sand that decided Hale against trying any of the larger sea animals as a meal. The sand was coral sand, and the color indicated a possibility of copper or cobalt. If the animals themselves had an excess of either element in their metabolic processes, they might not be too good for Hale's system.

He shrugged, shouldered his pack, and headed south along the beach. He was in no hurry to find food. He had plenty of concentrate on his back; when exactly half of it was gone, he would head back towards his ship.

Cardigan's Green has no moons, and the relatively mild tides caused by the planet's sun are almost imperceptible, but Hale could see that the broad beach had been built by some sort of regular change in the level of the water—probably a seasonal wind shift of some kind. At any rate, he decided that, soft as it was, the sand was no place to spend the night.

Instead, he slept on a high cliff overlooking the sea. In the mountains, he 

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