A soldier who should have been dead reached upward and let his arm fall over his eyes. The motion, small to me as the stir of a fly’s leg, caused a crow to flap away. I saw a snap of brilliance as light touched something on the moving hand, a ring or bracelet. He was like a sleeper who covers his eyes to preserve a dream. I thought: Man, turn over, why don’t you? Turn away from the light if it hurts your eyes!

In the talk of the Moha men who passed below me I had heard no one speak of the horn call. Maybe each man supposed the music was for him alone.

It seemed to me I must go to that man whose arm had moved, or I would dream of him. I climbed down from my oak and walked boldly to the road. No danger. A red squirrel was already on a branch beside the road, watching me without scolding. I stepped out from the bushes and turned left, toward the battlefield, and reached it in a few minutes after only a few turnings of the road. The crow sentinels squawked word of me. I saw the lurching run and climb of one of the larger birds, red-necked and hideous, who circled so closely above me that I caught his stench and was almost fouled by a spatter of his muck

The first man I passed wore dark green. He lay in the roadside ditch, face upturned and no-way angry. His bow was shorter and heavier than mine; it would be hard to bend but easy to carry in thick woods. I might have taken it but for a superstitious feeling that to do so would put me on a level with the vultures. I felt absurdly that all the dead were delaying me, as if they could wish to speak. A wart-nosed Moha veteran, for one, his gashed neck so twisted that although he lay belly-down his spiritless eyes appeared to watch me — why, alive he’d have had nothing to say to me, more than a snarl to get off the sidewalk if he noticed my gray loin-rag.

The man whose arm had moved lay as before, but he was dead. Maybe he had been all the time, the motion only one of those aimless things that occur after death. That sparkle on his hand was a ring, ruby-colored glass. Knowing him dead, I was free to be afraid again. The Katskil soldiers might not have fled far; slave gangs would come from Skoar to carry in the Moha dead. I crossed the rise and started down the other side intending to get back under the forest cover.

There had been some fighting on this side of the ridge; not much. I was halted by the sight of a small sandycolored beast crouched at the edge of the road. A scavenger dog, large for his breed. They are said to be clever enough to follow an army on the march, as sometimes they follow brown tiger, and for the same reason. The dog, unaware of me, was watching something beyond a patch of bushes at my right. I had come quietly; his nose would have been already charged with the smell of human beings and their blood.

A little stream flowed from the woods into the ditch along the road. Toward this, from the thick bushes, a Katskil soldier was crawling, his bronze helmet slung over his arm. A thin gray-eyed boy, maybe seventeen. He was attempting to pull himself along by his arms, one leg helping. The other leg was gashed from hip to knee, and an arrow-shaft protruded from his left side.

The dog was a poor slinking thing, but it could kill a helpless man. The boy saw the brute suddenly and his face remained blank, curiously patient, shining with sweat. I set an arrow and as the dog whirled at the slight noise to face me I sunk it in his yellow chest. He leaped and tried to bite his flank and died.

The boy watched me, puzzled, when I said: “I’ll get you the water.” He let me take his helmet. It was hard for him to drink, his shaky hands no help. He rolled his head away and said: “I a’n’t nothing to ransom — the old man ha’n’t got a pot, never had.” The effort of speech brought a stain of blood to his mouth.

“Will I lift you?”

He looked at the water, wanting it, and nodded. I felt the splash of the first rain-drops on my head. At the touch of my arm at his shoulder I saw it was too much for him. I spooned water in my hand, and he got down a little but lost it in a sharp cough. The arrow may have pierced his stomach. He said: “Shouldn’t’ve tried it.”

I took the rag from my head and tried to close up the long wound in his thigh. The rag was not long nor wide enough; trying to fasten it was a nightmare frustration. A bang and roll of near thunder almost covered what the soldier was saying: “Let it be. Be you Moha, that red thatch?”

They have an odd speech in Katskil. I had heard it at the inn, though not much in the last two years when the war jitters were building up. They drawl in a pinch-nose way, leave out half their rs and any syllable that doesn’t happen to suit them.

I told him: “I got no country.”

“Ayah? You be’n’t with us, I know ever’ damn fool bum in the b’talion including myself.”

“I’m alone. Running away.”

“I get it.” The rain came then in a sudden and ponderous rush, soaking us, hammering my back. I leaned over him; at least my shirt could keep the downpour from battering his face. “Ran away once myself — tried to, I mean.” He seemed to want to talk. “Pa caught me filling a sack, believe me I got no forrader. He wa’n’t for me going into the A’my neither, said it was all no consequence. You killed that yalla dog real neat.”

“Damn scavenger.”

“Jackalaws we call ’em down home. Handle a bow real good.”

“I been in the woods a lot.”

“Tell by the way you walk.” His voice was reaching me with difficulty through the roar of water around us. “Running away. That ’ere gray — your ballock-rag — that mean bond-servant? Does in my country.”

“Uhha.”

“Look, boy, don’t let it bug you. I want to tell you, don’t let ’em tromp you or tell you where to go. They spit in your eye you spit back, see?… Nice country hereabouts, might be good corn land. Our outfit laid up all the night in the woods — under stren’th, the damn fool brass, the way they do things, one comp’ny split off yesterday for another job — hell with it. Wanted to say, I was noticing what a pile of oaks you got around here. Means good corn land, ever’ time. Last night was a real foggy sumbitch, wa’n’t it?”

“I slept in a tree.”

“Do tell. Raining now, a’n’t it?” Both of us were drenched, the water bouncing a stream from a crease in his shirt where I couldn’t shelter him, and pelting on his legs. But he was really asking, not sure of the world, his eyes losing me, finding me again.

“It’s raining some,” I said. “Listen, I’m going to get you deeper in the woods where won’t nobody search, understand? Stay by while you heal up. Then you can come along.”

“Sure enough?” I think he was seeing it, as I was trying to — the journeying, friendship, new places. We’d go together; we’d have women, amusement, something always happening. Above all, the journeying.

I said: “We’d get along all right.”

“Sure. Sure we will.”

I never learned his name. His face smoothed out completely and I had to let him lie back on the earth.