"Bob, are you all right?" he called when his brother came into view. Bob looked bedraggled and there was dirt on his face; he nodded and waved, breathing heavily.

"They were climbing toward the knob," Mark said, suddenly at Barry's side. He had come upon him from a different direction, invisible until he spoke.

Now the boys were straggling into the same area, and they looked worse than Bob. Some of them had been crying. Just as Mark had predicted, Barry thought.

"We thought we might be able to see where we were if we climbed higher," Bob said, glancing at Mark, as if for approval.

Mark shook his head. "Always go down, follow a stream, if you don't know where you are," he said. "It'll go to a bigger stream, then finally to the river, and you can follow it back to where you have to go."

The boys were watching Mark with open admiration. "Do you know the way down?" one of them asked.

Mark nodded.

"Rest a few minutes first," Barry said. The voices were gone now, the woods merely dark woods, uninhabited by anything at all.

Mark led them down quickly, not the way they had gone up, not the way he had followed them, but in a more direct line that had them looking over the valley within half an hour.

"It was a mistake to risk them like that!" Lawrence said angrily. It was the first council meeting since the adventure in the forest.

"It's necessary to teach them to live in the woods," Barry said.

"They won't have to live out there. The best thing we can do with the woods is clear them as quickly as possible. We'll have a shelter for them down below the falls where they'll live, just as they live here, in a clearing."

"As soon as you're away from this clearing, the woods make themselves felt," Barry said. "Everyone has reported the same terror, the feeling of being closed in by the trees, of being threatened by them. They have to learn how to live with that."

"They'll never live in the woods," Lawrence said with finality. "They'll live in a dormitory building on the bank of the river, and when they travel, they'll go by boat, and when they stop, they'll stop in another clearing where there is decent shelter, where the woods have been beaten back and will be kept back." He emphasized his words by hitting his fist on the tabletop as he spoke.