XIII.
Yggdrasil shakes, and shiver on high
The ancient limbs, and the giant is loose;
Elder Edda
In the black, cramping tunnel Thorn could only swing his knife in a narrow arc, and the snarl of the attacking dog was concentrated into a grating roar that hurt his eardrums. Nevertheless, knife took effect before fangs, and with an angry whimper the dog backed away—there was no room to turn.
From the receding scuffle of its claws Thorn could tell that it had retreated almost to the beginning of the tunnel. He relaxed from the crouch that had put his back against the rocky roof, sprawled in a position calculated to rest elbows and knees, and considered his situation.
Of course, as he could see now, it had been an inexcusable blunder to enter the tunnel without first building a fire to insure his being able to get back to a place from which he could use his slingshot. But coming down the ravine he hadn't seen a sign of the devils, and there was no denying it had been necessary to revisit the cave to see if Thorn III had any extra food, weapons, or clothing stored there. The need for food was imperative, and yesterday he and Darkington had completely failed in their hunting.
He wondered if Darkington would attempt a rescue. Hardly, since it would be late afternoon before the gnarled little man returned from his own hunting circuit. With night coming on, it was unlikely that he would risk his life venturing down into the ravine for the sake of a man whom he believed to be half-crazy. For Thorn had tried to tell him altogether too much about alternate worlds in which Civilization had not perished. Darkington had dismissed all this as "the dreams," and Thorn had shut up, but not until he realized he was forfeiting all Darkington's confidence in him as a hard-bitten and realistic neo-savage.
Besides, Darkington was a little crazy himself. Long years of solitary living had developed fixed habit patterns. His hunger for comradeship had become largely a subjective fantasy, and the unexpected appearance of an actual comrade seemed to make him uncomfortable and uneasy rather than anything else, since it demanded readaptation. A man marooned in a wilderness and trying to get back to civilization is one thing. But a man who knows that civilization is dead and that before him stretch only dark savage eons in which other creatures will have the center of the stage, is quite a different animal.
Something was digging into Thorn's side. Twisting his left hand back at an uncomfortable angle—his right still held the knife or cutter—he worked the pouch from under him and took out the offending article. It was the puzzling sphere that had stayed with him during all his passages between the worlds. Irritably he tossed it away. He had wasted enough time trying to figure out the significance or purpose of the thing. It was as useless as ... as that graveyard of skylons up there.