He neared the corner, walking slowly, observing the markings on the ground. The markings were altered beyond the turning, forming a troughlike line. They narrowed, widened, halted in the form of circular depressions.

  He paused when he saw where they led, rushed forward when he saw something other than rock.

  Singer’s prints marked the ground before the rough cairn, near to the protruding limb. It was a longer while before he could bring himself to move a few stones and then only after probing thoroughly. He kept at it for several minutes, until he was sweating and breathing heavily. But at last he beheld the eye, dull now, in the sleek, unmoving head.

  He got it, Fisher said. He nailed the thing.

  Ironbear did not respond.

  It’s over, Fisher told him. Singer won.

  He’s beautiful, Ironbear said. That neck…the eye, like a jewel…

  Dead, Fisher said. Wait while I check. I’ll tell you where to climb out. We’ll have someone pick you up.

  But where’s Singer?

  I guess he knows how to take care of himself. He’s safe now. He’ll turn up when he’s ready. Hang on.

  I’m going after him.

  What? What for?

  I don’t know. Call it a feeling. Say I just want to see the man after all this.

  How’ll you find him?

  I’m starting to get the hang of this tracking business. I don’t think it will be too hard.

  It’s all over—and that’s a dangerous place.

  His trail has run through safe spots so far. Besides, I’ve got a phone here.

  Don’t you flip out, too!

  Don’t worry about it.

  Ironbear turned away, pushed up his goggles, shifted to normal spectrum, began following Singer’s tracks.

  I’m going to leave you for a time, Fisher said. I’m going to tell the others. Also, I’ve got to rest.

  Go ahead.

  Ironbear headed north. For a moment it seemed that he heard a train whistle, and he thought of his father. Fat snowflakes filled the air. He wrapped his muffler around his nose and mouth and kept going.

  Mercy Spender

  when she heard the news, opened the bottle of gin she had brought along

  & poured herself a stiff one, humming “Rock of Ages” all the while; feeling responsibility dissolve, giving thanks, deciding which books to read

  & what to knit during her convalescence; offered a word or two for the soul of Walter Sands, whom she saw before her in the glass, suddenly, shaking his head;

  “Rest in peace,” she said

  & chugged it,

  & when she went to pour another the glass broke somehow

  & she was very sleepy

  & decided to turn in

  & save the serious part for tomorrow;

  & her sleep was troubled.

  Alex Mancin

  tripped home when he heard the news, the game being over, his side having won again;

  & after he’d said goodbye to the others

  & gone through, he visited the kennels

  & played with the dogs for a time, lithe, yipping & licking— he could read their affection for him

  & it warmed him—

  & then visited his console, a glass of warm milk at his right hand, taking action on the multitude of messages which had come in, as always; too keyed up to sleep, thoughts of the recent enterprise dashing into and out of his mind like puppies;

  & the smile of Walter Sands seemed to flash for a moment on the screen as he read a list of stock quotations

  & toyed with a pair of souvenir dice he’d found in the bottom drawer of the dresser in the back room.

  Elizabeth Brooke

  wanted to get laid, was surprised

  at the intensity of the feeling, but realized that the previous days’ pace & tensions, suddenly relaxed, called for some physical release, too;

  & so she bade the others farewell

  & tripped back to England to call her friend to join her for tea, to talk of her recent experiences, listen to some chamber music

  & lay the ghost of Walter Sands which had been troubling her more than a little.

  Charles Dickens Fisher

  in his room at the Thunderbird Lodge with a pot of coffee, looked out of the window at the snow, thinking about his brother-in-law

  & the Indians in western movies he had seen

  & wilderness survival

  & the great dead beast whose image he caused to appear before him on the lawn

  (frightening a couple across the way who happened to look out at that moment), recalled from a video picture he had summoned earlier, eye blazing like Waterford crystal, fangs like stalactites;

  & then he banished it

  & produced a full-sized image of Walter Sands, sitting in the armchair looking back at him,

  & when he asked him,

  “How do you like being dead?”

  Sands shrugged

  & replied,

  “It has its benefits, it has its drawbacks.”

  Going. Along the western rim of the canyon now, heading into the northeast. Tirning, taking an even more northerly route. Away from the canyon, across the snows, toward the trees. His way had brought him over the water and up the wall nearly an hour before. Up here where the wind was strong, though the snowfall had lessened to an occasional racing flake.

  He bore on. A coyote howled somewhere in the trees or beyond them, ahead. A woodland smell came to him as he advanced, and the sounds of rattling branches.

  He looked back once before he entered the wood. It seemed that there was a greenish glow rising just above the rim of the canyon. He lost sight of it in a snowswirl a moment later, and then there were trees all around him and a diminishment of the wind. Ice fell with crisp and glassy sounds when he brushed against boughs. It was like another place, a place of perpetual twilight and cold, where he had hunted what he came to call the ice bears, the sun a tiny, pale thing creeping along the horizon. At any moment the high-pitched whistle of the bears might come to him, and then he would have only moments in which to throw up the barrier and lay down a paralytic fire before the pack swirled in toward him. Move the barrier then to preserve the fallen before their fellows devoured them. Call for the shuttle ship…

  He glanced overhead, half expecting to see it descending now. But there was only a pearl-gray folding of clouds in every direction. This hunt was different. The thing he sought would not be taken so simply, nor borne away for enclosure. All the more interesting.

  He crossed an ice-edged streamlet and his way swerved abruptly, following its course through an arroyo where something with green eyes regarded him from within a small cave. The ground rose as he advanced, and when he emerged the trees had thinned.

  His way took him to the left then, continuing uphill. He mounted higher and higher until he came at last to stand atop a ridge commanding a large view of the countryside. There he halted, staring into the black north, into which his trail ran on and on for as far as he could see in the odd half-light which had accompanied him on this journey. Opening his pouch, he cast pollen before him onto it. Thrning then to the blue south, way to the earth-opening from which he had emerged, he cast more pollen, noticing for the first time that there was no trail behind him, that his way to this place had been vanishing even as he walked it. He felt that he would be unable to take a step in that direction if he were to try. There was to be no return along the way that he followed.

  He faced the yellow west, place where the day was folded and closed. Casting pollen, he thought about endings, about the closing of cycles. Then to the east, thinking of all the mornings he had known and of the next one which would come out of it. Seeing for a great distance into the east with unusual clarity, he thought of the land over which his vision moved, adding features from the internal landscape of memory, wondering why he had ever wished to deny this Dinetah which was so much a part of him.

  For how long he looked into the east he could not tell. Suddenly the air about his head was filled with spinning motes of light accompanied by a soft buzzing sound. It was like a swarm of fireflies dancing before him. Abruptly they darted off to his right. He realized then that it was a warning of some sort.

  He looked to the right. There was a green glow moving among the trees in the distance. He looked away, placing his gaze upon his trail once again, and then he moved off along it.

  Shortly he was running, ice particles stinging his face, driven by gusts of wind which raised them in occasional brief clouds. The snow did not obscure the trail, however. It was visible through everything with perfect clarity. Continuing to follow it into the distance with his eyes, he saw that it ran into an arroyo twisting off to the left. It seemed to narrow as it entered that place. Following, he saw that the narrowing continued until it appeared the thinness of a Christmas ribbon toward the center of the declivity. Strangely, however, the portion he was traversing appeared no narrower, though he knew that he had already reached and passed beyond the place where the thinning had begun. Instead, he detected a new phenomenon.

  At first it was only that the arroyo had seemed somewhat deeper and longer than his initial impression had indicated. As he moved more deeply into it, however, the place itself seemed larger, a huge canyon with high walls. And the farther he progressed, the steeper the walls became, the greater the distance from wall to wall. It also was now strewn with massive boulders which had not been apparent at first. Yet the red way he followed remained undiminished. There were no signs of the contraction he had noticed earlier.

  An enormous white wheel flew past him, sculpted and brilliant, five-limbed like a starfish. Immediately another moved slowly overhead, descending. He realized that it was a snowflake.

  The place was larger than Canyon del Muerto, much larger. In moments, its walls had receded into the distance, vanished. He increased his pace, running, leaping, among the huge rocks.

  He topped a rise to discover a massive glassy mountain looming before him, its prismatic surfaces retailing rainbows at peculiar angles.

  Then he was descending toward it, and he could see where his trail ran into a large opening in its side, a jagged slash-mark through stone and sheen, like a black lightning bolt running from about a third of its height downward to the earth.

  A gust of wind blew him over and he regained his footing and ran on. A snowflake crashed to the earth like a falling building. He raced across the top of a small pond which vibrated beneath him.

  The mountain towered higher, nearer. Finally he was close enough to see into the great opening, and he saw that it shone within as well as without, the walls sparkling almost moistly, rising in a pitched-tentlike fashion to some unseen point of convergence high overhead.

  He rushed within and halted almost immediately. His hand went to his knife before he realized that the men who surrounded him were multiple images of himself reflected in the gleaming walls. And his trail running off in all directions …Twisted images.

  He bumped into a wall, ran his hands down its surface. His trail seemed to go straight ahead here, but he saw now where the real only seemed to join the illusory. It slid to the right, he could tell now.

  Three paces and he bumped into another wall. This could not be. There was nothing else for the trail to do. It proceeded directly ahead here, with no deviations, reflected or otherwise.

  He reached forward, felt the wall, searched it. His reflection mimicked his movements.

  Abruptly, there was nothing. His hand moved forward as he realized that only the upper portion of his way was blocked. He dropped to all fours and continued onward.

  As he crawled, the reflections shifted in the shadows around him. For a moment, from the corner of his eye, to the right, it seemed that he was a slow, lumbering bear, pacing himself. He glanced quickly to the left. A deer, a six-pointer, dark eyes alert, nostrils quivering. Multiple reflections caused them all to merge then, into something that was bear and deer and man, something primeval, working its way, like First Man, through narrow, dark tunnels upward to the new world.

  The reflections ahead showed him that the overhead space was growing larger again, turning into a high, narrow, Gothic arch. He rose to his feet as soon as he noticed this, and the animal images slipped away, leaving nothing but the infinity of himself on all sides. All colors, in various intensities, lay ahead. He went on, and when he saw that he was heading toward a way out, he began to run.

  The area of light seemed to grow slightly smaller as he advanced upon it. The reflections which ran beside him now varied through prisms and shadows. And he noted that they were all differently garbed. One bounded along in a pressurized suit, another in a tuxedo; another wore only a loincloth. One ran nude. Another wore a parka. One had on a blue velveteen shirt he had long forgotten, a sandcast concho belt binding it above the hips. In the distance, he saw himself as a boy, running furiously, arms pumping.

  Smiling, he ran out through the opening, along the red way. The canyon walls appeared and closed in on him, diminishing in height as he advanced.

  He halted and looked back.

  There was no shining mountain. He retraced his steps a dozen paces and stooped to pick up a piece of stone containing a cracked quartz crystal which lay on the ground. He held it up to his eyes. A rainbow danced within it. He dropped it into his pocket, feeling as if it held half of time and space.

  He ran for nearly an hour then, and ice crystals scratched like the claws of cats at rocks and tree limbs, at his face. The frozen earth made noises like crinkling cellophane beneath his feet. Streaks of snow lay like crooked fingers on the hillsides. A patch of sky lightened and thunder rumbled nearby. His way led into the mountains, and soon he began to climb.

  * * *

  When I callt

  they come to me

  out of Darkness Mountain.

  Pipelines cross it,

  satellites pass above it,

  but I hold the land before me,

  and all things that hunt

  and are hunted within it.

  I have followed the People

  across the eons,

  giving the proper hunter his prey

  in the proper time.

  Those who hunt themselves,

  however, fall into a special category.

  Certain sophistications were unknown

  in ancient times.

  But you are never too old to learn,

  which is what makes this business interesting

  and keeps me black-winged. Na-ya!

  Out of Darkness Mountain, then:

  Send an ending.

  * * *

  And climbing, Everything strange. He had lost track of 173 time and space. Sometimes the countryside seemed to roll by him, other times it seemed that he had moved for ages to cover a small distance. The trail took him among more mountains. He was no longer certain as to precisely where he was, though he was sure that he was still heading north. The snow turned into rain. The rain came and went. The trail led upward once again and moved through rocky passages. In places, streamlets rushed by him, and he passed through narrow necks with his back pressed against stone, fingertips and heels his only purchase. The clouds were occasionally delineated by a bright scribbling, to be wiped away by the grayness moments later.

  He passed through an opening so narrow that he had to strip off his pack and jacket and go sideways. It cut sharply to the left, and he knew that he could have missed it even in full daylight without the guiding trail that led him on. Glowing forms seemed to writhe in crevasses he passed before the way widened again, like the mating movements of the tall, spindly anklavars on the world called Bayou.

  When he turned and stretched his cramped muscles, he halted. What was this place? There was a ruin built into the cliff face to the right. Farther ahead there was another, to the left and higher, at a place where the canyon continued its widening. Stone and rotted adobe, they were ruins with which he was not familiar, though he had once thought that he was aware of almost all of them. He was tempted to pause for a quick investigation, but the drumbeat commenced again, slowly, and his trail ran on to greater heights.

  The canyon turned to the right, its floor rising even farther, its walls spread wider. He climbed, and there were more ruins about. The name “Lukachukai” passed through his mind as he remembered the story of a lost Anasazi ruin. The wind grew still and the pulse of the drum quickened. Shadowy shapes darted behind broken walls. He stared at the high, level place before him. He saw the end of his trail. A chill passed over his entire body, and he felt the hairs rise on the nape of his neck.

  He took a step forward, then another. He moved cautiously, slowly, as if the ground might give way beneath him at any point. It was right, though, wasn’t it? Of course. All trails end the same way. Why should this one be any different? If you tracked anything through its entire life, from its first faltering step until its final faltering step, the end was always the same.

  Back beside a rock, beneath an overhang, his trail ended before the vacant gaze of an age-browned human skull. Beyond that, he could not see the way.

  The rhythm of the drumbeat changed. Mah-ih, the Trickster, Coyote, He-who-wanders-about, peered at him from beyond the comer of a nearby ruin. A white rainbow yei formed an arc from the top of one canyon wall to the other. He heard the shaking of rattles now, accompanying the drumbeat. A green stem poked through the ground, rose upward, put forth leaves and then a red flower.