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By Root 9305 0

divided in two. Croft deliberated. In the jungle, unable to see the sun, it was impossible for anyone but Martinez or him to know in what direction they were traveling. Croft had noticed earlier that the larger trees leaned toward the northwest; he had checked it with his compass, and decided they had been wrenched that way in a hurricane when they were young. He accepted it as a reliable guide, and all that morning as they had moved up the river he had been noting the direction in which they marched. He guessed that they must be very close to the end of the jungle; they had walked more than three miles, and the river generally had moved toward the hills. But here it was impossible to determine which stream to follow; both veered off at an angle, and it was conceivable they might meander for miles through the jungle, parallel to the open hills. He and Martinez talked about it, and Martinez selected a tall tree off the stream and began to climb it.

He clambered up by grasping the vines that circled about it, using the nodes of the trunk for his footholds. When he reached the highest fork, he crawled out on a limb, edging himself forward cautiously. High up, he halted and surveyed the terrain. The jungle spread beneath him in a green velvet nap. He could no longer see the river, but not more than half a mile away the jungle ended abruptly, and a progression of bare yellow hills mounted toward the distant slopes of Mount Anaka. Martinez drew out his compass, and determined the direction. He was feeling the satisfaction of doing a job at which he knew he was proficient.

He climbed down, and talked to Croft and the Lieutenant. "We follow this one," he said, pointing to one of the tributaries, "maybe two-three hundred yard, then we cut trail. No river in the hill right there." He pointed toward the open country he had seen.

"Okay, Japbait." Croft was pleased. The information had not surprised him.

The platoon began marching again. The stream Martinez had chosen was very narrow, and the jungle closed over it almost completely. After a hundred yards they were forced to slough through the water on their hands and knees, ducking their heads to avoid the leaves and brambles that drooped into the stream. It became shortly no wider than a footpath and began shredding into many tiny runs of water which seeped from the rocks of the forest. Before they had gone a quarter of a mile, Croft decided to cut trail. The stream took a bend back toward the ocean, and it would be worthless to follow it any longer.

"I'm gonna divide up the platoon for cutting trail," he told Hearn, "but I'm gonna leave us out of it, 'cause we'll have enough to do."

Hearn was panting. He had no idea of what was customary on something like this, and he was too fatigued to care much. "Anything you say, Sergeant." Afterward he was a little worried. When you were with Croft, it was too easy to let him handle all the decisions.

Croft took a sight with his compass in the direction he wanted to travel, and found a tree, in the brush about fifty yards away, which would be a good target. He gathered the platoon around him, and divided them into three teams of four. "We're gonna cut trail," he told them. "To start you can aim about ten yards to the left of that tree. Each team is gonna work about five minutes, and then get spelled ten. They ain't any reason why we gotta be all day doin' this, so let's not be fuggin-off. You can take ten before you start, and then, Brown, you begin it with your men."

They had to slash a route through a quarter mile of dense brush, through vines and bushes and bamboo groves, around trees, and into the thickest brambles. It was slow, tedious work. Two men labored side by side, hacking with their machetes at the net of foliage, trampling underfoot what they could. They progressed at a rate of about two yards a minute, working quickly through a thinner patch of brush only to halt and chop inch by inch at a tangle of bamboo. It had taken them three hours to advance up the river, and by noon, after two more hours of hacking a trail, they had