It was Masurathoo, fumbling with his badly torn rain gear, who pointed out the powder. “Look there, my friends. No, not by the spines, please. At the area around the mouth.”
His companions did as they were instructed. A dark maroon residue clung to the outer edges of the round suckerlike oral cavity. Inspecting the others, they found the same substance lining every mouth.
Jemunu-jah looked around uneasily, his ears in constant motion, his tongue ball shifting nervously from one cheek to the other. “Something kill them while they are waiting to kill us. But whatever it was, it not eat them.”
“Yet.” An equally uneasy Hasa found himself looking from left to right, turning a slow circle to closely search their immediate surroundings. Forest noises filtered through the rain. Small brightly colored shapes flitted here and there among the branches and the raindrops. After assuring himself that nothing massive and threatening was moving through the varzea nearby, he turned his attention back to the inert forms of the mysteriously deceased mokusinga.
They were surrounded by the usual phantasmagoria of plants, molds, rusts, and fungi. At the base of a twisted trunk, a carnivorous blue plate fungi snapped shut over a crawling tinworm. That was the only evidence of nonmotile predation occurring in their immediate vicinity. Nothing was emerging, either rapidly or slowly, to consume the bodies of the dead mokusinga except for a few dirty whitish-yellow filaments of some opportunistic subsurface fungi.