And this time his teeth scored, ripping the tender and sensitive and flesh of all the inside of the first and second joints of Borckman's right hand.

Jerry's teeth were needles that stung, and Borckman, gaining the grasp on Jerry's jaw, flung him away and down so that almost he hit the _Arangi's_ tiny-rail ere his clawing feet stopped him.
And Van Horn, having finished his rearrangement and repair of the explosive-filled drawer under the mate's bunk, climbed up the companion steps, saw the battle, paused, and quietly looked on.
But he looked across a million years, at two mad creatures who had slipped the leach of the generations and who were back in the darkness of spawning life ere dawning intelligence had modified the chemistry of such life to softness of consideration.

What stirred in the brain crypts of Borckman's heredity, stirred in the brain-crypts of Jerry's heredity.
Time had gone backward for both.

All the endeavour and achievement of the ten thousand generations was not, and, as wolf-dog and wild-man, the combat was between Jerry and the mate.

Neither saw Van Horn, who was inside the companionway hatch, his eyes level with the combing.
To Jerry, Borckman was now no more a god than was he himself a mere, smooth-coated Irish terrier.