The walk from the rocky valley somewhere south of the Endless Meadow took more than a day, so drained were they from their desperate charge. For that entire walk, not a single word passed between them.

This summer was incredibly dry. They stopped by the muddy basin of an oasis to gulp down their fill, then, because their failure had left them hungry, they dug out some fireworms from the bank. The meat was rubbery and bland. It was not the way their first levin hunt should have ended.

It hadn’t all been so bad. They had had little successes, here and there. Within their first hour they had caught one gatherer unawares, back turned, as they had tried that last time. Yesterday, just before the charge, they had cornered a lone wanderer against a riverbank and tore him to strips, though Guff had taken his sharpened twig to the foreleg. But those were slim pickings for a pair of young and eager skern.

What they had seen troubled them. They were no more than a year, but they hatched ready for the hunt, and that year had been spent only in training and exercise. They fed from the pile of strips of levin and cussock-meat that the larger skern brought for the youngsters, and they listened in the burrows after dark to tales of the glory days that had only just ended. They knew that the world was changing.

A levin hunt should be about savagery and energy. Finesse, too, had always been required for the long, fat reptilians to creep to a suitable ambush point, to a point where their stubby legs could propel them into the heart of their prey before they could scatter. But the elders remembered the years when the hunt was all about how many they could consume. Not if they could catch the levin at all.

Venn and Guff had ranged south well beyond the burrows’ usual stalking grounds. And they had witnessed the difference for themselves. The Endless Meadow was strewn with wide, smooth lines of pebbles where the levin could move rapidly and easily, and where a skern would quickly find their claws slipping painfully from underneath their bulk. And the furred ones moved together, not in straggling forage-groups of twos and threes, but close-knit packs. Some gathered and munched the berries on their favoured plants. Others simply stood and watched, or crouched unobserved under dried grass, ready to squeak a signal when their eternal foes approached.

And the guards had ways to hurt.

By the time they reached the burrow, on the gritty sand bank by the nameless marsh where they had hatched, Venn and Guff were sore from their wounds. They bypassed their kin and slithered down into the cool mud to heal. A long time they wallowed, rolling away when the nipping flies drew too close, and the sun was setting when Guff spoke. “We have to tell the master.”

Venn grunted in response. It was going to be as painful as the stones.

Reluctantly, they sloshed out of the marsh and up the bank. There were few skern to be seen, because it was egg-laying season again, and their females were all deeper into the marsh, where the secret pit protected next year’s brood. But the ones that were left, basking in the last rays of sun, turned watchfully and hissed as they passed.

“You should not have gone,” said Vunn, the old hunter, as they neared the master’s burrow.

“Has there been an attack?” Venn questioned. It was known that the levin had turned the tide west across the marsh last full moon. An organised band of the mouse-men had crept at night into the depression where the burrow had lain for centuries, and scrabbled at the baked walls with stone tools until it collapsed. Most of the skern raked their way out, but were forced to flee beneath a hail of twigs and rocks. The old clan was broken and divided.

“No,” Vunn replied. “But the master had not given a blessing.”

Venn and Guff carried on miserably. There was a reason they had ventured so far from their territory. The master had not granted them leave for their first hunt. Conditions had been deemed too dangerous. Only the very experienced had clashed with the levin for endless days.

They should not have gone, but the hunger for fresh meat had been too strong. And now, though they cringed from the master’s entrance, they were forced to report what had happened.

The situation was worse than he thought.