The trail did not cut across this space, but skirted around the perimeter, almost three quarters of the circle, so that we reentered the forest not far from where we had come out. And it was just before we went back into that gloom that I paused in slashing at a looping vine to examine a sign beside the trail which proved to me that we were not alone in walking it.
There was a clump of tall stalks, lacking leaves to their very tips. On each of these tips was a cluster of tiny, feathery darkred fronds. Two of the stalks had been so recently severed that a watery substance still oozed from the clean cuts across their hollow stems. I leaned to see them the closer and there was no doubt. They had not been broken, but cut. I sliced another to prove it. In my hand the smooth stalk was supple, whipping, but from the cut lower portion the liquid welled.
“Fishing-“
“What-?” I began.
“Silence!” Eet was at his most arrogant. “Fishing-yes. Now take care. I cannot read much of this creature’s mind. It is on a very low band – very low. It thinks mainly of food, and its thought processes are very slow and primitive. But it is traveling toward a body of water where it hopes to fish.”
“The one with the club?”
“Unless there are two native species of primitive forms,” conceded Eet, “this one is like that. As to its being the same, who knows? I think this is a route often used by its kind. It walks the trail with the confidence of a thing going a familiar road on which it has nothing to fear.”
I did not share his confidence. For there was a thunderous crash not too far away. I threw myself, and incidentally Eet, toward the nearest tree, planted my back to it, and stood with that sap-stained knife ready. My field of vision was too limited. I could see nothing beyond the vines and boles. But I tried to put my ears to service.
Nothing stirred. It had sounded as if one of those trees, which must have roots reaching to the very core of this world, had crashed. Crashed-? But the trees must eventually die. And having died and begun to rot, with the weight of the vines and parasites with which they were covered, would they not fall? As had the one which had made the second clearing? But what if the very one I had chosen as my backing would be the next? I moved away almost as fast as I had sought it.
I do not know how a thought can suggest laughter, but such a thought flowed from Eet. He was fast becoming, I decided, a less than perfect companion.
As if I were being punished for that, I caught one of my boots in a loop of root or vines and crashed as helplessly as the dead tree must have done. A thrust of irritation, sharp as any physical blow, struck me. Eet had leaped free in one of his flash reactions, and now sat a short distance away, his fangs bared, his whole stance expressing disgust.
“If you must clump about,” he spat, “then at least lift your feet when you move them. But why do you continue to wear that burden of a useless overskin?”
Why indeed? I struggled to sit up. Inside the confines of the suit, my coverall was plastered to my body with sweat. I itched where I could not scratch, and I felt as if soaking in a bath for several days would not be enough to free me from the smelly burden of myself. Yet I clung to the suit as a shell animal might cling to its shell as a protection against the unknown.
I could never wear it into space again. When I examined if I could see tears which must have been inflicted during my descent of the tree. And the boots weighed my feet into a shuffle which could be dangerous in the muck. The harness which carried our very limited supplies could be adapted, but the suit itself- Eet was right. It had no further use. Yet when my fingers went to the various seals and buckles, they moved reluctantly, and I had to fight down the strong need to hold to my shell.
However, as I discarded that husk and felt the cool wreath about my damp body, I had a sense of relief. When we moved on, I had a small pack on my back, my hands were free to swing the cutting knife, and I found I was no longer slipping and sliding. For the tough web packs worn inside space boots not only protected my feet from close contact with the muck, but gave me purchase. Now I longed for a pool or stream in which I could dunk my steaming body and get really clean – though any such exercise on a strange world would be utter folly, unless I could be very sure that the water in question had no inhabitants who might resent intrusion.
“Water-“ Eet announced. His head swung from right to left and back again. “Water- much of it- also alien life-“
Scents crowded my nose. I could put name to no one of them. But I accepted Eet’s reading. I slowed my pace. Underfoot the game trail was no longer so hard of surface, and the slots of the tracks in it were deeper sunk, more sharply marked. I made out one, superimposed on earlier prints, which was a little larger than those I myself left. It was wedge-shaped, with indentations sharply printed in a fringe of points extending beyond the actual track.
I am certainly no tracker, nor have I hunted as a reader of trails. Though I had gone to frontier and primitive planets, it had been to visit villages, port trading posts. My acquaintance with any wilderness arts was close to zero.
But my guess was that whatever creature had so left his mark was large and heavy, as those indentations were deep and cleanly marked. And perhaps it was advancing at a deliberate pace.
“Water-“ Eet repeated.
He need not have given that caution. The trail was mud now, holding no recognizable prints. There were here and there humps formed by harder portions of earth, and I jumped from one to the next where I could. In no time at all the mud was covered with a glaze of liquid out of which the trees and growth projected. And there were bits of refuse caught in tangles of vine roots, held there as high as my shoulder. It had the appearance of a land which had been flooded in the not too distant past, and which was now slowly drying off.
Puddles smelling of decay and bordered by patches of yellow slime showed between the trees, in hollows in the ground. And there were noisome odors in plenty. We passed a huddle of bones caught between exposed vine roots, and a narrow skull bared its teeth at us.
The puddles became pools and the pools linked into stagnant expanses of water. Here trees had been undermined, so that they leaned threateningly. And smaller ones that had been overthrown showed masses of upturned roots.
“Caution!”
Again I did not need Eet’s warning. Perhaps his sense of smell was so assaulted by the stenches about that he had not sniffed that worker ahead until I had sighted him, her, or it.
On a tree trunk which was not yet horizontal, but leaned at an angle out over the largest pond we had yet seen, lurked a creature. In this light it was easy to see. It was humanoid, save that a bristly hair grew in a stiff upright thatch on its head, in two heavy brows, down the outer sides of its arms and legs to wrists and ankles, and in round, shaggy patches, three of them, down its chest and middle.
Around its loins was a skirt or kilt of fringe, and encircling its thick neck was a thong on which were strung lumps of dull green alternating with red cylinders. A heavy-headed club had been wedged for safekeeping beside a stub of branch, as its owner was busy with an occupation demanding full attention.
A withe, which I recognized as one of the slender canes cut from the patch we had passed, had been bent into a hoop, one end extending for a handle. This was held firmly between the back feet of the worker, gripped tightly in huge claws. In its hands the native held a forked stick in which was imprisoned a wriggling black thing that fought so furiously and was in such constant motion I could not be certain of its nature.
Its struggles did it no good as the worker passed it back and forth across the hoop, from one side to the other, then from top to bottom and back again. A thread trailed from the end of that whipping body, to be caught on the frame of the hoop and joined to its fellows, forming a mesh. With a last pass of the captive, the workman appeared satisfied with the result. Then, with a sharp flip of his wrist, he sent the forked stick and its prisoner out into the pond. As soon as the stick hit water there was a turmoil into which stick and captive vanished, not to appear again.