But that couldn't be. The weather was all wrong. And that ravine was much more thickly wooded. Besides, erosion patterns were always repeating themselves.
He started to examine the queer, bulky clothing Thorn II had been wearing. In doing so, he got one good look at his hands—and stopped.
He stood for a long moment with his eyes closed. Even when soft paws pattered warily somewhere over his head and a bit of gravel came trickling down, he did not jerk.
Rapidly the determination grew in his mind that he must get to the hilltop and establish his position before he did anything else, before he thought anything else, certainly before he examined his hands or his face more closely. It was more a terror-inspired compulsion than a determination. He stepped to the rocky lip in front of the cave, and looked back. Again there was the impression of a gray, furry animal streaking for cover. Something about the size of a cat. He hurriedly surveyed the routes leading upward, picked one that seemed to slope more gradually and avoid the steeper barren stretches, and immediately started up it at a scrambling trot, his eyes fixed resolutely ahead.
But after he had gone a little way, he saw something that made him stop and stare despite the compulsion driving him.
On a pine-framed boulder about a dozen yards ahead, to one side of the route he was taking, three cats sat watching him.
They were cats, all right, house cats, though they seemed to be of a particularly thick-furred breed.
But one wouldn't normally find house cats on a wild-life reserve. Their presence argued the nearness of human habitation. Moreover, they were eying him with a poised intentness that indicated some kind of familiarity, and did not fit with their earlier racing for cover—if those had been the same animals.
He called, "Kitty!" His voice cracked a little. "Kitty!"