The Hunter
--Ernie Clark


Em                G              D/F#           Em
Can you hear that haunting note, faintly in the wind,
  G            D/F#    Am              Em
A horn as of a hunter, blowing without end?
Em           D/F#     G              Am
Chasing for eternity, seeking living prey,
       G           D/F#       Em
In the half-sunken city lying empty.

Our ship had made a voyage to the central Milky Way,
Hoping twenty thousand years could wash our guilt away,
We did not sail straight back to Earth,  but stopped a little soon,
At a once-human world now deserted.

Why did they go,  how did they meet their doom?
What menace made the city now a silent, empty tomb?
We had to know, perhaps the whole of Mankind was no more,
Save for we few poking through this wreckage.

We lost a man to fishlike creatures walking by the sea;
Chased the monsters to the deeps, and solved our mystery:
The colonists were not extinct, they'd gone to sea instead,
Where many thousand years had made a difference.

The fish who once were men we leave, going now our way.
Dust to dust we might have guessed, but not this human clay!
Every world of Man we knew along its private path
Over twenty thousand years has been going.

And now I know whose horn I hear, blowing in the wind.
Chasing all the works of Man, a hunt with but one end,
I know whence comes this haunting tone, forevermore I'll hear
The horn of Time the Hunter!