While one stood guard that night, the others slept. In the morning, they made some more soup, adding berries for an experiment, and the old woman drank it all from the proferred gourd. Then the language lessons began. She was an eager teacher once she understood that they weren’t just fattening her up so they could eat her.
The next day Kickaha set out after the people who’d abandoned her. Two days later he returned with flint spear heads, axes, hand scrapers, and several war boomerangs.
“It was easy. I sneaked in at night while they were snoring away after a feast of rotten elephant meat. I picked what I wanted and took off. Even the guards were sleeping.”
Learning the old woman’s language proceeded swiftly. In three weeks Shoobam was telling them jokes. And she was a storehouse of information. A treasure trove, in fact.
Primed with data, the three set to work. While one of the three guarded Shoobam, the others went out to get the materials needed. They killed the plants which she had told them were likely to contain gallotannin, or its equivalent, in certain pathological growths. Another type of tree which they caught and killed had an exceptionally lightweight wood yet was stress-resistant.
Kickaha made a crutch for Shoobam so she could become mobile, and Anana spent some time every day massaging the old woman’s semiparalyzed legs. She was not only able to get around better, she began to put on some weight. Still, though she enjoyed talking to the three and felt more important than she had for a long time, I she wasn’t happy. She missed the tribal life and especially her grandchildren. But she had the stoic toughness of all the natives, who could make a luxury out of what was to the three the barest necessity.
Several months passed. Kickaha and company worked hard from dawn to long past dusk. Finally, they had three parawings much superior in lightness of weight, strength, and durability to the original made by Anana. These were stiffened with wooden ribs and were not to be folded.
Told by Shoobam about a certain type of tree the bark of which contained a powerful poison, Kickaha and Anana searched for a grove. After finding one, they pulled a dozen plants over with lariats and killed them. During the process, however, they narrowly escaped being caught and burned with the poison exuded by the tentacles. The old woman instructed them in the techniques of extracting the poison.
Kickaha was very happy when he discovered that the branches of the poison-plant were similar to those of yew. He made bows with strings from goat intestines. The arrows were fitted with the flint heads he’d stolen from Shoobam’s tribe, and these were dipped in the poison.
Now they were in the business of elephant hunting.
Though the pachyderms were immune to the venom on the darts propelled by certain plants, they succumbed to that deriv from the “yew” trees. At the end of another month, they had more than the supply of elephant stomach lining needed. The membranes weighed, per square yard, two-thirds less than the gazelle hides. Anana stripped the hides from the parawings and replaced them with the membranes.
“I think the wings’ll be light enough now to work in the planet’s field,” she said. “In fact, I’m sure. I wasn’t too certain about the hides.”
Another plant yielded, after much hard work and some initial failures, a glue-like substance. This could seal the edges of the strips which would compose the balloon envelope. They sealed some strips of membrane together and tested them over a fire. Even after twenty hours, the glue did not deteriorate. But with thirty hours’ of steady temperature, it began to decompose.
“That’s fine,” Anana said. “We won’t be in the balloon more than an hour, I hope. Anyway, we can’t carry enough wood to burn for more than an hour’s flight.”
It looks like we might make it after all,” Kickaha said. “But what about her?”
He gestured at Shoobam.
“She’s saved our necks or at least given us a fighting chance? But what’re we going to do with her when we lift off? We can’t just leave her. But we can’t take her with us, either.”