thickly soled feet necessary to negotiate springtime swamps and summer
hardpan. The skin was glabrous, bluish, with brown and black mottlings
that were beginning to turn gaudy colors as mating season approached.
The heads were faintly suggestive of elephants’, round, with beady eyes,
large erect ears that doubled as cooling surfaces, a short trunk that
was a chemosensor and a floodtime snorkel, small down-curving tusks on
the males. The people wore only loincloths, loosely woven straw cloaks
to help keep off “insects,” necklaces and other ornaments of bone,
shell, horn, teeth, tinted clay. Some of their tools and weapons were
bronze, some–incongruously–paleolithic.
That much was easily grasped. And while their size was considerable,
adult males standing over two meters and massing a hundred or more
kilos, females even larger, it was not overwhelming. They were bisexual
and viviparous. Granted, they were not mammals. A mother fed her infants
by régurgitation. Bodies were poikilothermic, though now functioning at
a higher rate than any Terran reptile. That was not unheard of either.
Nonetheless, Flandry thought, it marked the foundation of their
uniqueness. For when your energy, your very intelligence was a function
of temperature; when you not only slept at night, but spent two-thirds
of your life among the ghostly half-dreams of hibernation–
About a score had come to meet the xenologists, with numerous young
tagging after. The grownups walked in ponderous stateliness. But several
had burdens strapped on their backs; and behind them Flandry saw others
continue work, packing, loading bundles onto carrier poles, sweeping and
garnishing soon-to-be-deserted houses.
The greeting committee stopped a few meters off. Its leader elevated his
trunk while dipping his ax. Sounds that a human palate could not
reproduce came from his mouth. Flandry heard the computer’s voice in his
radio unit. “Here is Seething Springs. I am”–no translation available,
but the name sounded like “G’ung”–“who speaks this year for our tribe.”
An intonation noted, in effect, that “tribe” (Eriau “maddeuth,” itself
not too close an equivalent of the Anglic word by which Flandry rendered
it) was a debatable interpretation of the sound G’ung made, but must
serve until further studies had deepened comprehension of his society.
“Why have you come?”
The question was not hostile, nor was the omission of a spoken welcome.
The Domrath were gregarious, unwarlike although valiant fighters at
need, accustomed to organizing themselves in nomadic bands. And, while
omnivorous, they didn’t make hunting a major occupation. Their near
ancestors had doubtless lived entirely off the superabundant plant life
of summer. Accordingly, they had no special territorial instincts.
Except for their winter dens, it did not occur to them that anyone might
not have a perfect right to be anywhere.