Cha'tima glared down at the five and one year olds who were still chattering, probably wondering where their instructor was, not knowing she was hovering above them. Not only, she noticed angrily, were they chattering with their mouths, a few who had the Talent of Sound like she were chattering with their minds. Well, she would fix that.

Picking an empty space in the middle of the group, Cha'tima knocked an arrow, aimed, and let it fly. It whizzed past several of their ears and landed with a solid thock in the ground. An immediate hush fell over the students. Cha'tima smiled.

"That," she told them, "is more like it. If you plan to be hunters, you will have to learn to be more quiet. If there was anything for you to eat for lunch, it is certainly gone now."

"We have to catch out lunch?" one of the human boys asked disdainfully. "At my house, we have a personal hunter who brings us all our meals. I'll just go home and get lunch."

"And do you think you'd get any meals at all if your personal hunter was as loud as you?" Cha'tima asked. "No one will be going home for lunch. You will go hungry or find something, understood?"

"Yes, Instructor Cha'tima," they chorused, though quite a few were not thinking what they were saying.

"I may as well warn you now that I have the Talent of Sound, so if you would please keep unpleasant thoughts out of your head so I don't have to punish you for them," she made a point at looking at each student individually as she said this. When she was sure they were all too scared of her to think at all, she smiled.

"There are only three things you need to do while you are with me to get on your road to becoming a hunter: follow orders, pay attention, and keep quiet," Cha'tima continued to her now captivated audience. "Any breaking of these rules will result in punishment. I will not tell you the punishment, you'll have to find it out for yourself. Trust me, it's not a curiousity you want to have satisfied."

A Tun'mrin girl raised a shaking hand. Cha'tima nodded to her and she spoke in an even shakier voice. "Will we be allowed to fly, Instructor Cha'tima?"

"Don't be afraid, I don't eat too many students, not good for the figure, you know," Cha'tima told her, but the student didn't seem any less afraid. "Flying is a privelege reserved for instructors. If you choose, once you have completed a sufficient amount of training as a hunter, to be an instructor, then you may fly during class. Until then, all feet are to stay on the ground and all wings are to stay folded."

Ten pairs of wings snapped in at once. There was some mental grumbling but Cha'tima only glared at the grumblers, which was enough to make their minds go blank.

"If we are done fooling around," Cha'tima asked pointedly of two humans who were making faces in the back of the group. Both froze and faced forward immediatly. Fear, Cha'tima noted with a smile, was a wonderful tool. "We will begin with the lesson. The main weapon you will be using as a hunter is the bow and arrow." She produced her bow and tapped her quiver of arrows. "This is the most precise and easy to use for most beginners, so you will be learning how to use it first."

Cha'tima landed easily and walked over to the cabinet where the training bow and arrows were stored. "These," she told the group, holding up one of the cloth tipped arrows, "won't kill anything. It will stun a small animal or give you a nasty bruise, but otherwise it is harmless. All the same, you are to aim for the targets, not for eachother. Come get a bow when I call your name."

Finally, after having to referee many fights and fix many bows, the bows and arrows were handed out and the students were lined up in front of the targets. "Take your marks," Cha'tima barked from a safe distance above. The bows came up in a ragged line and little fingers struggled to knock arrows. "Aim!" the ragged line moved in all directions and finally settled somewhere around where it should have been. "Fire at will!" arrows spun, twirled, shot, lept, and bounced. But not a single one hit the targets.

Suddenly, Cha'tima was surrounded by black cold, as if someone with the Sound were trying to speak to her from a cold, dark room, or she was listening to a blind person's thoughts. She couldn't see and she screamed as she felt herself falling but couldn't see to do anything about it. Out of it all, there came a voice unlike any other she'd ever heard.

You can hear me, the voice said amazedly. But where are you? You are not on Pern.

Cha'tima tried to gather her thoughts into words but then she hit the ground. The black and cold vanished and she was laying on the ground between the targets and the marks. Her students were clustered around her, pushing and jostling to see what had happened to their instructor.

"Did you feel it? Did you hear the voice?" Cha'tima asked one of the students she knew to have the Talent of Sound.

"Feel what?" the student asked. "Should I have felt something?"

"I don't know," Cha'tima admitted. "Well don't crowd me! Scoot! I have to get- oh, fridding hell." Her swearing raised a few eyebrows but she was busy trying to keep the pain from clouding her mind to notice. One, if not both, of her wings were hurt, an injury that could take weeks to heal.

"Get a healer!" she commanded as she rolled onto her stomach, clenching her teeth at the pain in her wings. "Now!"

Five students ran off. She doubted more than two of them would bring a healer back. "Would the rest of you put your bows and arrows away? Lessons are over for the day."

The girl who had asked to fly was staring intently at her wings. "Don't worry, instructor Cha'tima," she announced, "only one of them is broken."

"You have the talent of Sight or something?" Cha'tima growled. The girl paled but nodded back. "Then what are you doing here? You should be a healer."

The girl was saved the trouble of explaining herself because one of the students came back with two healers and a stretcher. One healer, a Tun'mrin man, placed a cool hand, no doubt using the Talent of Touch, on her wings. Immediatly, the pain was gone. Then he touched the back of her neck, and Cha'tima found herself drifting off, cursing the Talent of Touch combinded with the healing trade.

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