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base of the tree. The flames roared up the tree, burning the bark off very fast, to the very top, and running along the branches to their tips. At the bottom, where the trunk was ringed with fire, a soft red glow began to show on the bare translucent trunk. Then, using the longest saw blade they had, so that they could stand back clear of the fire, the men began to saw through the red-hot band of the tree trunk—and the wood cut like butter, smoothly and easily. The tree toppled and fell, crashing through the outermost branches of neighboring trees, and thudding on the ground in a shower of torn twigs and leaves. Everyone cheered and shouted.
    â€œRight,” said the Guide. “That’s how. Now who? Who volunteers to fell the trees for huts? Who volunteers to find isolated trees? We shall need many of them.”
    Pattie expected Father to volunteer, since he had found how to do it, but he didn’t. He went back to Shine with the Guide and began to help plan where the huts would be, and what they would be like. Joe joined the logging party. Pattie and Jason volunteered to find trees. There were a lot of scattered single trees of great size standing among the rocks where the wood petered out at the edge of the lake. Running around finding them was fun.
    The huts were lovely when they were made. They were fluted because the round side of the split trunks faced outward. They were shiny silver-gray, and the light shone softly through the walls, so they needed no windows at all. The roofs were made of thin slices of wood—it split so easily these were simple to make, and seemed more likely to last than thatch. It made the roofs look like lizard skin, with overlapping scales. Each hut had a tall chimney made of big rough stones fixed with lots of cement. The cement had come on the spaceship, but the sand to mix it had come from the lake shore, and gave it a soft pink tinge. By day a pale gray shadowy light filled the huts, falling through roof and walls, and at night the fires in each hut made bright red flickering patterns over the walls, and you could see the warm glow through the cabin sides from one hut to another. The work went forward steadily, from dawn to dusk, managing a hut each day, by working in gangs—one splitting trees, another building chimneys, another putting up walls and roof. They made one hut for each family, and a big hut in the middle of the site for a meetinghouse. Each hut had a vegetable plot beside it, and behind Shine, on the wide plain that lay between the lake and the spacecraft’s landing place, they began to mark out fields.
    They made a chicken run, and a rabbit run, putting the hutches from the spaceship at one end, and wire netting on poles to make the enclosures. Every day, the chickens were to be fed on corn and millet from a big supply sack; but the rabbits were given not quite enough of their food, to encourage them to eat the strange grass on the new ground.

Chapter 3
    With so much going on, it was only the children, only the smallest colonists, who could run around and play, and wander while everyone else was working. So it was Pattie and Jason who found Boulder Valley.
    It was by getting lost that they found it. They had walked together along the lake shore, finding little pink transparent pebbles at the water’s edge, and watching jellyfish. The lake had swarms of jellyfish in it, very bright green jellyfish, which bobbed around, and oozed themselves into funny shapes to wriggle along. Pattie and Jason walked a long way on the beach, and when they got tired, swam in the lake. Then they began to walk back to Shine, and it seemed they had been on the way back for some time and they still couldn’t see the village huts.
    â€œLet’s take a shortcut,” said Jason. “If we go over that hump of land there, it should get us home a shorter way.”
    Pattie followed him. But when they climbed the hump of land that jutted out from the hills toward