He lifted them and touched his chapped, scaly face, with its high-growing, uncombed beard and long hair matted against his neck under the fur hood.
His clothes were a miscellany of stiff, inexpertly-tanned furs, portions of a worn and dirty suit of flying togs, and improvised bits of stuff, such as the hacked-out sections of elastoid flooring constituting the soles of his boots.
His heavy belt, which was reinforced with reading-tape, supported two pouches, besides the knife, which seemed to be a crudely-hilted cutter from a hyperlathe.
One of the pouches contained a sling shot powered by strips of elastoid, several large pebbles, and three dark, dubious chunks of meat.
In the other were two small containers of nutriment-concentrate with packaging-insignia of twenty-five years ago, a stimulol cannister with one pellet left, two bits of sharp metal, a jagged fragment of flint, three more pieces of elastoid, more reading-tape, a cord made of sinew, a glastic lens, a wood carver's handsaw, a small, dismantled heat-projector showing signs of much readaptive tinkering, several unidentifiable objects, and—the smooth gray sphere he had stolen at the Yggdrasil.
Even as he was telling himself it could not be the same one, his blunt fingers were recognizing its unforgettable smoothness, its oblate form, its queerly exaggerated inertia. His mind was remembering he had fancied it a single supergiant molecule, a key—if one knew how to use it—to the doors of unseen worlds.
But there was only time to guess that the thing must be linked to his mind rather than to any of the bodies his mind had occupied, and to wonder how it had escaped the thorough search to which he had been subjected in the Black Star, when his attention was diverted by a faint eager yapping that burst out suddenly and was as suddenly choked off.
He turned around. Up the boulder-studded slope he had just ascended, streaming out of the underbrush at its base, came a pack of wolves, or dogs—at least thirty of them. They took the same sloping course that he had taken. There was a strange suggestion of discipline about their silent running. He could not be sure—the light was very bad—but he fancied he saw smaller furry shapes clinging to the backs of one or two of them.
He knew now why he had spent time admiring a fire.
But the pack was between him and that fire, so he turned and ran across the plateau toward where he had glimpsed the rising wisp of smoke.