BEYOND THE FEARFUL FORESTOriginally published in Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy, April 1951.
The bones lie light in the fertile soil of Sunset Fields. You can prod them out with a few thrusts of your bare toes. The roots of the big luxurious tree ferns carry skulls and skins and back-bones up to the frond-filtered shining of day, and even the delicately questing purple tendrils of the burrowflower may drag an occasional finger or toe bone from its uneasy rest, so light they lie.
The bones do not decay. Nobody knows why. Animal bones decay. The skeletons of our own revered dead fall away to powder in a generation or two. But the bones of Sunset Fields are like the unchanging granite of the jagged cliffs, and of them we make our arrow points and lance heads, our hammers and our
