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somewhat larger than I'd thought, as powerfully built as a Terran plowhorse but somewhat taller, with long thick gray-black hair like that of a mountain goat back on Earth. Their heads were somewhat wider and shorter than a horse's, but otherwise they were built very similiarly indeed. Their eyes were large and brown and inevitably studied me with the calmness of a cow, lacking that nervousness always to be seen in the eyes of horses on Earth.

Since they were mostly like a horse I treated them like horses, patting their sides and speaking softly to them. They seemed totally unafraid, even disinterested, showing enthusiasm only when I daily kicked fodder down to them from the tiny loft above their heads. At such times they came very close to actually prancing.

I had never ridden a horse on Earth and knew next to nothing about them, but in a way I considered that possibly an advantage, since I couldn't make any mistake in handling these creatures based on their similarity in appearance to something they were not. I was learning from scratch and therefore moved with a caution I might not otherwise have shown.

There was a saddle in the barn, and by a process of trial and error I learned how to put it on. Beginning the fifth day, when I felt strong enough, I taught myself to mount, and then to sit astride the unmoving beast, and then to ride it at a slow and even walk, and ultimately how to ride it at a trot. I practiced with both of them, alternating with scrupulous fairness, wanting them both to get a full opportunity to become familiar with me. They would soon become vital to my progress, even to my life.

In all of this I had remarkably fine weather, losing only one day, the seventh, due to bad conditions. A snowstorm had blown up the night before, a whirling raging monster that lashed at the cabin as though enraged to find it poaching on the storm god's land, and though it was blown out by "morning" there was still full cloud cover, which lasted the full day. The moon, of course, had not the strength to cast illumination through cloud, and that day remained as blindly black as any night. Blacker: there were not even the dozen or so faint stars I was used to seeing in the sky.

I remained within the cabin all that day, sullen and pout-

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ing, angered at the moon for having deserted me. I left only once, lighting my way fearfully with a burning branch from the fire, going by necessity to the barn to feed the hairhorses. I couldn't carry both the torch and a weapon, so had Torg-mund's pistol tucked inside my belt and was prepared at any instant to hurl the torch into the snow, yank out the pistol, and fight my way back to safety. However, I was unmolested, fed the hairhorses successfully, and returned at once to the warm protection of the cabin, locking the door again behind me.

As to the wood—a heavy, almost smokeless, beautifully slow-burning variety—it was stacked against the cabin's rear wall. There were no trees, no vegetation of any kind, growing wthin sight of the cabin, which meant that Torgmund must have had to make frequent trips in the direction of dayside for both fuel and fodder.

In the totally atomistic society of anarchists, Torgmund had chosen for himself perhaps the only sensible and viable form of life: absolute separation from and independence of all other human beings. And, of course, it was only when he forcibly introduced a second human being into his atomistic existence that he ran into trouble.

So here was another face of Aanrchaos, the rugged individualist's heaven. So long, that is, as he never bent a fraction of an inch from the solitary implications of his principles.

There were no books in the cabin, no pictures, no films or music tapes. In many ways, Torgmund had been no more than an unusually clever animal, a sort of beaver combined with bear. His remote freehold, though it used a few of the most immediately practical of man's discoveries and inventions, was finally a refutation of and a turning away from all of man's history, all of his progress, all of his unending attempt at self-civilization.

After ten days, and though the outer world still frightened me, I was much relieved to be getting away from there.

I took both hairhorses. One I saddled, and would ride, while the other I loaded with Torgmund's provisions. His rifle and pistol and axe and knife I kept with me; spare furs and clothing I added to the pack animal's load, and at moon-rise on the eleventh day I was ready to leave.

There remained only one problem, but that one insoluble. I

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had no idea in which direction lay dayside. In deepest night I had gone outside—in terror, of course—to stare toward the horizon in all directions, but had seen not even the faintest glow anywhere. Torgmund had no compass, and even if he had it would have done me no good as I didn't know what an Anarchaotic compass would be oriented toward.

My only clue was Torgmund's statement that the moon did cross dayside, which meant that the spot where the moon first appeared above the horizon had to be either east or west and could not be north or south. I also knew that I was one day's ride from the evening zone in which Torgmund had found me, though I had no way of knowing what this meant in absolute terms, or how one day of Torgmund's travel would equate with one day of my own.

Still, one had to make a choice. I finally decided to travel toward the morning moon, giving three days to the trip, and if by the end of third day I had not come within sight of the dayside horizon I would turn around and come back and try the other way. If I had guessed wrong it would mean a full week wasted, but there was nothing else to do. And, just in case, I brought along a number of thin branches from the woodpile in back, to leave as markers along the way, to guide me should I have to turn back. If my first guess was wrong, I would want to be able to find the cabin again, in order to restock myself with supplies.

I set off the first thing, on the morning of the eleventh day, with the moon barely a slit crescent—like a nearly closed eye— at the far horizon ahead of me. I rode the lead hairhorse, with the pack second beast trailing us, kept to us by a rope around its neck and tied at the other end around the pommel of the saddle.

We moved at a steady lope, the hairhorses trotting with easy muscularity across the snowy and icy ground. The rhythmic chack-chack-chack of their hoofs on die crust of snow and ice was the only sound.

We moved directly toward the thin crescent of moon, passing near to where I had left Torgmund's body. I did not look in that direction as we went by, though it was anyway probably still too dark for me to have seen anything.

When, a few minutes later, I looked back, the cabin was a tiny black smudge against the pale whiteness of the snow. I

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faced front again, folded my gloved hand around the pommel, felt the flex and flow of the animal's muscles against my knees, and rode onward toward the slowly opening luminous yellow eye.

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although it was no colder at night than in the false moon-

day, it somehow seemed colder then. I assumed it was so be

cause I was no longer in motion, but had to huddle fireless in

one spot and wait for the moon to rise ahead of me once

again. I would have preferred to travel constantly but of

course could not; there was nothing but the moon itself to

give me my direction. .

Until the end of the third day, I saw nothing to indicate whether I was going in the right or wrong direction. It had seemed to me that the temperature must noticeably go either up or down, depending on whether or not I was moving toward dayside, but the biting cold, so far as I could tell, remained unchanged. That is, it seemed to be at one temperature when I was in .motion and at a lower one when I was at rest, and these two temperatures did not seem to vary.