But no. It disappeared with its prey, leaving only a bobbing fern.
Nirgal ran on. The day was darker than the cloud shadow could explain, a malign dimness. He had to focus on the trail. Light flickered through the shadows, white piercing green. Hunter and hunted. Ice-rimmed ponds in the gloom. Moss on bark, fern patterns in his peripheral vision. Here a gnarly pile of bristlecone pines, there a pit of quicksand. The day was chill, the night would be frigid.
He ran all day. His pack bounced against his back, nearly empty of food. He was glad he was nearing his next cache. Sometimes on runs he took only a few handfuls of cereal and lived off the land as best he could, gathering pine nuts and fishing; but on trips of that kind half of every day had to be spent in the search for food, and there wasn’t much to be found. When the fish were biting a lake was an incredible cornucopia. Lake people. But on this run he was going full tilt from cache to cache, eating seven or eight thousand calories a day, and still ravenous every evening. So when he came to the little arroyo containing his next cache, and found the arroyo’s side wall collapsed in a landslide over it, he shouted with dismay and anger. He even dug for a while at the pile of loose rock; it was a small slide; but a couple of tons would have to be removed. No chance. He would have to run hard across Ophir to the next cache, and go hungry. He took off in the very moment of realization, thinking to save time.
Now he looked for edible things as he ran, pine nuts, meadow onions, anything. He ate the food left in his pack very slowly, chewing it for as long as he could, trying to imagine it to some higher level of nutrient value. Savoring every bite. Hunger kept him awake part of every night, though he slept heavily through the hours before dawn.
On the third day of this unexpected hunger run he emerged from the forest just south of Juventa Chasma, in land broken by the ancient Juventa aquifer outbreak. It was a lot of work to make his way through this land on a clean line, and he was hungrier than he could ever remember being; and his next cache still two days away. His body had eaten all its fat reserves, or so it felt, and was now feeding on the muscles themselves. This autocannibalism gave every object a sharp edge, tinged with glories— the whiteness shining out of things, as if reality itself were going translucent. Soon after this stage, as he knew from similar past experiences, the lung-gom-pa state would give way to hallucinations. Already there were lots of crawling worms in his eyes, and black dots, and circles of little blue mushrooms, and then green lizardlike things scurrying along in the sand, right before the blurs of his feet, for hours at a time.
It took all the thought he could muster to navigate the broken land. He watched the rock underfoot and the land ahead equally, head up and down and up and down, in a bobbing motion that had little to do with his thinking, which browsed over near and far in an entirely different rhythm. The Juventa Chaos, downhill to his right, was a shallow jumbled depression, over which he could see to a distant horizon; it was like looking into a big shattered bowl. Ahead the land was rumpled and uneven, pits and hillocks covered with boulders and sand drifts, the shadows too dark, the sunlit highlights too bright. Dark yet glary; it was near sunset again, and his pupils were pinched by the light. Up and down, up and down; he came on an ancient dune side, and glissaded down the sand and scree, a dreamy descent, left, right, left, each step carrying him down a few meters, feet cushioned by sand and gravel shoved off the angle of repose. All too easy to get used to that; once on flat ground again it was hard work to return to honest jogging, and the next little uphill was devastating. He would have to look for a campsite soon, perhaps in the next hollow, or on the next sandy flat next to a rock bench. He was starving, faint with lack of food, and nothing in his pack but some meadow onions pulled earlier; but it would help to be so tired, he would fall asleep no matter what. Exhaustion beat hunger every time.
He stumbled across a shallow depression, over a knob, between two house-sized boulders. Then in a flash of white a naked woman was standing before him, waving a green sash; he stopped abruptly, he reeled, stunned at the sight of her, then concerned that the hallucinations had gotten so out of hand. But there she stood, as vivid as a flame, blood streaks spattering her breasts and legs, waving the green scarf silently. Then other human figures ran past her and over the next little knob, going where she pointed, or so it seemed. She looked at Nirgal, gestured to the south as if directing him as well, then took off running, her lean white body flowing like something visible in more than three dimensions, strong back, long legs, round bottom, already distant, the green scarf flying this way and that as she used it to point.