"That's nice," Harry Loren nodded. His wild hair brushed over his shoulders and reflected its yellowness against the sun. The knife then, the one that Kirk had thought about a moment ago, appeared in the figure's hand. "Bastard," Harry Loren hissed, and he was leaping at Kirk, the knife making a sweep toward Kirk's stomach.
Something kept Kirk from squeezing the trigger, and instead he swung his pistol so that it struck the brown, weathered knuckles. The knife flew into a thicket and Loren, screaming, was upon Kirk, reaching for Kirk's neck. Kirk wrenched backward and at the same time swung the barrel of the pistol toward the yellow flying hair. There was a cracking sound, and Harry Loren, brown and wild-looking, crumpled silently before Kirk's feet.
Kirk examined the man, then he reached down and picked up the knife from the thicket. It was crudely hammered out from some kind of alloy, but sharp nevertheless, and it could have been deadly in a hand like Harry Loren's.
Kirk looked again at the yellow-haired man on the ground. He was wearing some kind of ragged cloth about his waist and nothing else. Across his back, Kirk could see, was a curving scar, an inch wide and ten or twelve inches long. It was white and very noticeable against the brown of the man's skin.
Kirk bent down, looking at the scar carefully. It could have been made during a crash of a rocket, but there were, he noticed, fine whiter ridges running along the length of the scar as though they had been made by fine comb-like teeth. A talon, perhaps. Some kind of strange claw. Kirk straightened quickly.
It went through his head that Harry Loren might not be the only animal life on this planet. He tightened his hand on his pistol, stepping backward, his eyes darting.
But he could only pivot slowly, trying to see, to discover, and he was much too slow when he finally saw it. It was only a flash of yellow and brown, making a hissing kind of sound. He felt the ripping along his right arm. The pistol was going out of his hand. And a swirling blackness got in front of his eyes.
When he awoke he saw Harry Loren first, who was sitting up now, silent, motionless, with Kirk's pistol resting in his hands.
To the side of Loren and just a little behind rested a peculiar-looking thing. It was alive because its head, shaped like a cone that had been attached to its neck, kept swaying gently back and forth. The dark blue eyes, spaced back from the smallest end of the cone, were rather small with no lids. The creature's neck was long and thin, a multitude of shades of yellow and brown like the head, and the rest of the body widened out like a funnel and this area was covered with yellow feathers. It had what appeared to be arms and legs, long thin extensions of dark brown with large bony joints. At the end of each of these, Kirk could see a flat claw with rows of tiny comb-like teeth.