Something clutched at him and he felt it ripping his side, felt the blood flowing, and he screamed a high wild shriek that he couldn't stop.

In the camp his brothers sat up and looked about in terror. Danny!

"What was that?" Barry demanded.

Mark was standing up listening, but now the brothers were calling out, "Danny! Danny!"

"Tell them to shut up," Mark said. He strained to hear. "Make them stay here," he ordered, and trotted into the woods toward the latrine. He could hear the boy now, faintly, dashing madly into trees, bushes, stumbling, screaming. Abruptly the sounds stopped.

Mark paused again to listen, but the woods were silent. There was pandemonium behind him in camp and ahead of him nothing.

He didn't move for several minutes, listening. Danny might have fallen, winded himself. He might be unconscious. There was no way in the dark for Mark to follow him without sounds to lead him. Slowly he turned back to camp. They were all up now, standing in three groups, the two doctors also close to each other.

"I can't find him in the dark," Mark said. "We'll have to wait for morning." No one moved. "Build up the fire," he said. "Maybe he'll see the glow and follow it back."

One group of brothers started to throw wood on the embers, smothering it. Bob took charge, and presently they had a roaring fire again. Danny's brothers sat huddled together, all looking pinched and cold and very afraid. They could find him, Mark thought, but they were afraid to go after him in the black woods. One of them began to cry, and almost as if that had been the signal, they were all weeping. Mark turned from them and went again to the edge of the woods to listen.

With the first faint light of dawn Mark started to follow the trail of the missing boy. He had dashed back and forth, zig-zagging, rebounding from tree to bush to tree, Here he had run forward for a hundred yards, only to crash into a boulder. There was blood. He had been scraped by a spruce branch. Here he had run again, faster this time. Up a rise… Mark paused looking at the rise, and he knew what he was going to find. He had been trotting easily, and now he slowed to a walk and followed the trail, not stepping on any of Danny's prints, but keeping to one side, reading what had happened.

At the top of the rise there was a narrow ridge of limestone.