Secret of the Stars by Andre Norton Read Free Book Online Page B

his full stomach and the fact that so far he had managed to beat the odds. There was tomorrow in which to act, and he was still alive.
    The night was not quiet, for the half-butchered carcass proved bait for other inhabitants of Fenris. There were weird cries of protest and warning, snarls of battle, eyes gleaming across the flames at him. At last he sat up, blaster on his knee, straining his eyes in an effort to make out the forms he sensed waited out there for his fire to die.
    When the morning dawned the calm held, not even a cat’s paw of wind dabbed across the snow dunes. Joktar shrugged on his pack and tried to pick out a goal. The jumper lay to the north, at least he believed that the choked valley which held its wreckage lay to the north. He began to walk in that direction.
    The banners of poisonous steam ascended unruffled, marking a stretch of bare rock mottled with yellowish encrustations. But his path away from there was not easy. The snow had been sculptured into banks as desert sand is driven into dunes, each bank given a knife-sharp coating. To venture would leave him thigh- or waist-deep in soft snow. So he wove a trail back and forth.
    In all the white immensity, he was the only moving creature. No bird quartered the sky, and if any animal skulked there, Joktar could not spot it. Loneliness ate into him and he redoubled his struggles to reach the cliffs. Right beyond a single barrier might lie the road which the jumper had traveled.
    He paused, fought for control. To venture further down that path of thought was to end pounding at the door of some mine dome begging to be taken into its slave gang! More than just the active horrors the emigrants had been shown at the port might keep a man fast in bondage, the stark emptiness of Fenris itself worked for the companies.
    Joktar reached the cliffs, squatted in the lee of a boulder to eat of the fat he had seared in his morning fire; he followed those greasy mouthfuls with a concentrate tablet. Weariness weighed on him like an extra pack on his shoulders, but his determination to keep going set him to climbing.
    He dragged himself up on a plateau where the wind had swept away the snow which so encumbered the valley. To reach the other edge of that table land and see the new valley below was relatively easy. There was one thing about this snow-buried country, when the wind was dead there was no way to hide a trail. And below he could see one.
    Trees here were much taller than the stunted brush which had sheltered him from the storm. And into a grove of them wound that trail, coming out again and striking off at right angles.
    Those tracks drew Joktar. He fought, he crawled, he staggered on until he reached those two smoothly packed strips which hinted at a vehicle of some kind, the spoor running between them which might mark a man’s passing. He trailed it among the trees, out into the open, turned northward again toward the crags.
    The pale sun was well-down, evening was closing in. Joktar tried to quicken pace. The tracks led into another narrow valley. He guessed that he was perilously near the end of his strength. His body ached, his breath came in sharp, panting gasps and the snow slope before him dimmed and brightened in rhythm to the pounding of his heart.
    Lurching from side to side, unable to keep his feet, he crashed against a wall, clung there, staring blearily ahead. This trail could have been made any time since the end of the last storm, the traveler could be a day or more ahead.
    Here was no cave, but he hollowed out a small burrow in the shelter of a bush and choked down food. Tonight he must sleep. And once more rolled into a ball, Joktar met the cold and the dark as he had met the fury of the storm.
    Sound broke the silence of the mountains. Joktar started up. But that had been no roar of avalanche. He blinked at sun on the snow, stirred sluggishly. What had awakened him? A man’s shout? An animal cry?
    He hunted for food, realized that his