On the other hand, it may well have been that while she was their kind she had never been lost from them; that she had been born in the wild forest far from their haunts, her father maybe a renegade Fire-Man, her mother maybe one of my own kind, one of the Folk.

But who shall say?
These things are beyond me, and the Swift One knew no more about them than did I.
We lived through a day of terror.

Most of the survivors fled toward the blueberry swamp and took refuge in the forest in that neighborhood.

And all day hunting parties of the Fire People ranged the forest, killing us wherever they found us.

It must have been a deliberately executed plan.
Increasing beyond the limits of their own territory, they had decided on making a conquest of ours.