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much deeper, and melts much more slowly. I doubt we could push through, surely not without knowing the way. We would die.” He shook his head, clearly not happy with the situation. “We must winter here.”
SEVENTEEN
From—”Yunnan Ogres,” by Guillaume W. Das. Pages 84-95, In The Occupation of Post-Plague Terran Habitats by Large Predators, Maureen Boileau and Jauna C. Cos-tas, eds. University Press, a.c. 876.
The Sino-Tibetan imperial court is not what one ordinarily thinks of as a habitat for large predators— except of course predatory humans. However, at one time the emperor had a guard unit consisting of large furry predators referred to by the court as “yetis.” These are not the reputedly shy indigenous animals once believed to reside in the upper forests of the Himalayas. They are an extraterrestrial species brought to Earth during the exploration decades of the. 21st century, and housed in secure special habitats where they could be observed by students and public without being aware of it.
Because of their size and predatory, quasi-human appearance, in vernacular Anglic they were dubbed
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“ogres.” We will so refer to them here, to distinguish them from the indigenous yeti, real or mythical.
The sole extant source of scientific information on ogres is a cube published by the Interstellar Zoological society in a.d. 2078, and brought to New Home in the library of the colonist ship Vicente Hidalgo.
Physical Description
In appearance, an ogre is a large erect humanoid with short brown to occasionally rufous fur over the entire body including the face—everywhere but the soles and palms. A slight crest of fur extends along the midline of the skull above the forehead, down to the end of the spinal column.
Ogres have five-digit hands and feet, including opposable thumbs on the hands. The legs are quite humanoid and the feet quite long. They run on the balls of the feet, and when sprinting lean well forward, taking long strides. They jump remarkably well, considering their weight.
The torso is very powerful, most notably the high and rather narrow but otherwise human-like shoulders. The arms are long, compared to human arms, with the forearms and hands especially long. The upper arms are very thick and muscular, their grasp ferocious. They can pull close and crush, or hold their victim for biting or choking.
The claws on their feet are useful for traction. The claws on their hands however, are vestigial, being little more than thick fingernails. In hunting, the lack of effective claws on the hands is largely made up for by an extremely powerful grip.
Their jaws are elongated into a short, blunt muzzle, and their dangerous teeth are similar to those of gorillas. As in the gorilla, the skull of the ogre has a well-developed sagittal crest to which are anchored the thick jaw muscles that provide their crushing bite.
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Ogre Behavior on Their Home World
On their home world, ogres were, and presumably still are pack hunters, preying mostly on large herd animals. There, adult male ogres average more than two meters tall and typically mass about 200 kilos. Females average somewhat smaller—150—180 kilos. Ogres sprint much faster than humans, and even over middle distances are considerably faster than human athletes. But they are not as fleet as their prey animals. Their success derives from intelligent teamwork in the hunt, and endurance over long distances. They are more agile than might be expected, and extremely strong—considerably stronger, pound for pound, than a competitive human weight lifter.
While ogres use their innate speed and strength to bring down prey, in defense of their “nursery grounds” against other predators, they use crude but effective stone weapons.
Ogres are not scent hunters. Their sense of smell seems little or no better than a healthy, alert, primitive human hunter’s must have been in the Paleolithic. They have superior night vision, and on the steppes and savannahs of their home world they often hunt by night. However, night is intensely dark in their wild terran environment, the forests of Upper Yunnan, and there they are said to hunt almost solely by day.
Post-Plague Natural History of Ogres on Earth
Most of their post-plague natural history on Earth is conjectural, of course. The following reconstruction, based in part on interviews with humans in the Sino-Tibetan Empire, seems quite convincing, however. The IZS cube tells us that small ogre packs were installed in several zoological parks. These included the Kunming Zoological Park at Kunming, China, where the subtropical montane climate was thought to be reasonably well suited to them. Their