Kickaha, grinning, offered him a dripping cut.
“You could become a vegetarian. Nuts to the nuts, fruits to the fruits, and a big raspberry to you.”
McKay, grimacing, said, “I don’t like it either. I keep feeling like the stuffs alive. It tries to crawl back up my throat.”
“Try one of these kidneys,” Kickaha said. “They’re really delicious. Tender, too. Or you might prefer a testicle.”
“You really are disgusting,” Anana said. “You should see yourself, the blood dripping down your chin.”
But she took the proffered testicle and cut off a piece. She chewed on it without expression.
Kickaha smiled. “Not bad, eh? Starvation makes it taste good.”
They were silent for a while. Kickaha finished eating first. Belching, he rose with his knife in his hand. Anana gave him her axe, and he began the work of cutting off the horns of the antelope. These were slim straight weapons two feet high. After he had cut them off from the skull, he stuck them in his belt.
“When we find some branches, we’ll make spear shafts and fix these at their tips.”
Something gobbled in the darkness, causing all to get to their feet and look around. Presently the gobbling became louder. A giant figure loomed out of the dark red light. It was what Kickaha called a “moa” and it did look like the extinct New Zealand bird. It was twelve feet high and had rudimentary wings, long thick legs with two clawed toes, and a great head with a beak like a scimitar.
Kickaha threw the antelope’s head and two of its legs as far as he could. The lesser gravity enabled him to hurl them much further than he could have on Earth. The huge bird had been loping along toward them. When the severed pieces flew through the air, it veered away from them. However, it stopped about forty feet away, looked at them with one eye, then trotted up to the offerings. After making sure that the humans were not moving toward it, it scooped up the legs between its beaks, and it ran off.
Kickaha picked up a foreleg and suggested that the others bring along a part, too. “We might need a midnight snack. I wouldn’t recommend eating the meat after that. In this heat meat is going to spoil fast.”
“Man, I wish we had some water,” McKay said. “I’m still thirsty, but I’d like to wash off this blood.”
“You can do that when we get to the lake,” Kickaha said. “Fortunately, the flies are bedding down for the night. But if morning comes before we get to the water, we’re going to be covered with clouds of insects.”
They pushed on. They thought they’d covered about ten miles from the hill. Another two hours should bring them to the lake, if they’d estimated its distance correctly. But three hours later, by Anana’s watch, they still saw no sign of water.
“It must be further than we thought,” Kickaha said. “Or we’ve not been going in a straight line.”
The plain had begun sinking in along their direction of travel. After the first hour, they were in a shallow depression four feet deep, almost a mile wide, and extending ahead and behind as far as they could see. By the end of the second hour, the edges of the depression were just above their heads. When they stopped to rest, they were at the bottom of a trough twelve feet high but now only half a mile wide.
Its walls were steep though not so much they were unclimbable. Not yet, anyway.
What Kickaha found ominous was that all the animal life, and most of the vegetable life, had gotten out of the depression.
“I think we’d better get our tails up onto the plain,” he said. “I have a funny feeling about staying here.”
Urthona said, “That means walking just that much farther. I’m so tired I can hardly take another step.”
“Stay here then,” the redhead said. He stood up. “Come on, Anana.”
At that moment he felt wetness cover his feet. The others, exclaiming, scrambled up and stared around. Water, looking black in the light, was flowing over the bottom. In the short time after they’d become aware of it, it had risen to their ankles.