The Forgotten Planet

5 Meat of Man's Killing!

In their climb up from savagery, the principal handicap from which men have always suffered is the fact that they are human. Or it can be said that human beings always have to struggle against the obstacle which is simply that they are men. To Burl his splendid return to the tribe called for a suitable reaction. He expected them to take note that he was remarkable, unparalleled, and in all ways admirable. He expected them to look at him with awe. He rather hoped that the sight of him would involve something like ecstasy.

And as a matter of fact, it did. For fully an hour they gathered around him while he used his—and their—scanty vocabulary to tell them of his unique achievements and adventures during the past two days and nights. They listened attentively and with appropriate admiration and vicarious pride.

This in itself was a step upward. Mostly their talk was of where food might be found and where danger lurked. Strictly practical data connected with the pressing business of getting enough to eat and staying alive. The sheer pressure of existence was so great that the humans Burl knew had altogether abandoned such luxuries as boastful narrative. They had given up tradition. They did not think of art in even its most primitive forms, and the only craft they knew was the craftiness which promoted simple survival. So for them to listen to a narrative which did not mean either food or even a lessening of danger to themselves was a step upward on the cultural scale.

But they were savages. They inspected the dead spider, shuddering. It was pure horror. They did not touch it—the adults not at all, and even Dik and Tet not for a very long time. Nobody thought of spiders as food. Too many of them had been spiders' food.

But presently even the horror aroused by the spider palled. The younger children quailed at sight of it, of course; but the adults came to ignore it. Only the two gangling boys tried to break off a furry leg with which to charge and terrify the younger ones still further. They failed to get it loose because they did not think of cutting it. But they had nothing to cut it with anyhow.

Old Jon went wheezing off, foraging. He waved a hand to Burl as he went. Burl was indignant. But it was true that he had brought back no food. And people must eat.

Tama went off, her tongue clacking, with Lona the half–grown girl to help her find and bring back something edible. Dor, the strongest man in the tribe, went away to look where he thought there might be edible mushrooms full–grown again. Cori left with her children—very carefully on watch for danger to them—to see what she could find.

In little more than an hour Burl's audience had diminished to Saya. Within two hours ants found the spider where it had been placed for the tribe to admire. Within three hours there was nothing left of it. During the fourth hour—as Burl struggled to dredge up some new, splendid item to tell Saya for the tenth time, or thereabouts—during the fourth hour one of the tribeswomen beckoned to Saya. She left with a flashing backward smile for Burl. She went, actually, to help dig up underground fungi—much like truffles—discovered by the older woman. She undoubtedly expected to share them with Burl.

But in five hours it was night and Burl was very indignant with his tribesfolk. They had shifted the location of the hiding–place for the night, and nobody had thought to tell him. And if Saya wished to come for Burl, to lead him to that place, she did not dare for the simple reason that it was night.

For a long time after he found a hiding–place, Burl fumed bitterly to himself. He was very much of a human being, differing from his fellows—so far—mainly because he had been through experiences not shared by them. He had resolved a subjective dilemma of sorts by determining to return to his tribe. He had discovered a weapon which, at first, had promised—and secured—foodstuff, and later had saved him from a tarantula. His discovery that fish–oil was useful when applied to spider–snares and things sticking to the feet was of vast importance to the tribe. Most remarkable of all, he had deliberately killed a spider. And he had experienced triumph. Temporarily he had even experienced admiration.

The adulation was a thing which could never be forgotten. Human appetites are formed by human experiences. One never had an appetite for a thing one has not known in some fashion. But no human being who has known triumph is ever quite the same again, and anybody who has once been admired by his fellows is practically ruined for life—at least so far as being independent of admiration is concerned.

So during the dark hours, while the slow rain dipped in separate, heavy drops from the sky, Burl first coddled his anger—which was a very good thing for a member of a race grown timorous and furtive—and then began to make indignant plans to force his tribesmen to yield him more of the delectable sensations he alone had begun to know.

He was not especially comfortable during the night. The hiding–place he had chosen was not water–tight. Water trickled over him for several hours before he discovered that his cloak, though it would not keep him dry—which it would have done if properly disposed—would still keep the same water next to his skin where his body could warm it. Then he slept. When morning came he felt singularly refreshed. For a savage, he was unusually clean, too.

He woke before dawn with vainglorious schemes in his head. The sky grew gray and then almost white. The overhanging cloud bank seemed almost to touch the earth, but gradually withdrew. The mist among the mushroom–forests grew thinner, and the slow rain ceased reluctantly. When he peered from his hiding–place, the mad world he knew was, as far as he could see, quite mad, as usual. The last of the night–insects had vanished. The day–creatures began to venture out.

Not too far from the crevice where he'd hidden was an ant–hill, monstrous by standards on other planets. It was piled up not of sand but gravel and small boulders. Burl saw a stirring. At a certain spot the smooth, outer surface crumbled and fell into an invisible opening. A spot of darkness appeared. Two slender, thread–like antennae popped out. They withdrew and popped out again. The spot enlarged until there was a sizeable opening. An ant appeared, one of the warrior–ants of this particular breed. It stood fiercely over the opening, waving its antennae agitatedly as if striving to sense some danger to its metropolis.

He was fourteen inches long, this warrior, and his mandibles were fierce and strong. After a moment, two other warriors thrust past him. They ran about the whole extent of the ant–hill, their legs clicking, antennae waving restlessly.

They returned, seeming to confer with the first, then went back down into the city with every appearance of satisfaction. As if they made a properly reassuring report, within minutes afterward, a flood of black, ill–smelling workers poured out of the opening and dispersed about their duties.

The city of the ants had begun its daily toil. There were deep galleries underground here: graineries, storage–vaults, refectories, and nurseries, and even a royal apartment in which the queen–ant reposed. She was waited upon by assiduous courtiers, fed by royal stewards, and combed and caressed by the hands of her subjects and children. A dozen times larger than her loyal servants, she was no less industrious than they in her highly specialized fashion. From the time of waking to the time of rest she was queen–mother in the most literal imaginable sense. At intervals, to be measured only in minutes, she brought forth an egg, perhaps three inches in length, which was whisked away to the municipal nursery. And this constant, insensate increase in the population of the city made all its frantic industry at once possible and necessary.

Burl came out and spread his cloak on the ground. In a little while he felt a tugging at it. An ant was tearing off a bit of the hem. Burl slew the ant angrily and retreated. Twice within the next half–hour he had to move swiftly to avoid foragers who would not directly attack him because he was alive—unless he seemed to threaten danger—but who lusted after the fabric of his garments.

This annoyance—and Burl would merely have taken it as a thing to be accepted a mere two days before—this annoyance added to Burl's indignation with the world about him. He was in a very bad temper indeed when he found old Jon, wheezing as he checked on the possibility of there being edible mushrooms in a thicket of poisonous, pink–and–yellow amanitas.

Burl haughtily commanded Jon to follow him. Jon's untidy whiskers parted as his mouth dropped open in astonishment. Burl's tribe was so far from being really a tribe that for anybody to give a command was astonishing. There was no social organization, absolutely no tradition of command. As a rule life was too uncertain for anybody to establish authority.

But Jon followed Burl as he stamped on through the morning mist. He saw a small movement and shouted imperatively. This was appalling! Men did not call attention to themselves! He gathered up Dor, the strongest of the men. Later, he found Jak who some day would wear an expression of monkey–like wisdom. Then Tet and Dik, the half–grown boys, came trooping to see what was happening.

Burl led onward. A quarter of a mile and they came upon a great, gutted shell which had been a rhinoceros beetle the day before. Today it was a disassembled mass of chitinous armor. Burl stopped, frowning portentously. He showed his quaking followers how to arm themselves. Dor picked up the horn hesitantly, Burl showing him how to use it. He stabbed out awkwardly with the sharp fragment of armor. Burl showed others how to use the leg–sections for clubs. They tested them without conviction. In any sort of danger, they would trust to their legs and a frantically effective gift for hiding.

Burl snarled at his tribesmen and led them on. It was unprecedented. But because of that fact there was no precedent for rebellion. Burl led them in a curve. They glanced all about apprehensively.

When they came to an unusually large and attractive clump of golden edible mushrooms, there were murmurings. Old Jon was inclined to go and load himself and retire to some hiding–place for as long as the food lasted. But Burl snarled again.

Numbly they followed on—Dor and Jon and Jak and the two youngsters. The ground inclined upward. They came upon puffballs. There was a new kind visible, colored a lurid red, that did not grow like the others. It seemed to begin and expand underground, then thrust away the soil above in its development. Its taut, angry–red parchment envelope seemed to swell from a reservoir of subterranean material. Burl and the others had never seen anything like it.

They climbed higher. As other edible mushrooms came into view Burl's followers cheered visibly. This was a new tribal ground anyhow and it had not been fully explored. But Burl was leading them to quantities of food they had never suspected before.

Quaintly, it was Burl himself who began to feel an uncomfortable dryness in his throat. He knew what he was about. His followers did not suspect because to them what he intended was simply inconceivable. They couldn't suspect it because they couldn't imagine anybody doing such a thing. It simply couldn't be thought of at all.

It is rather likely that Burl began to regret that he had thought of it. It had come to him first as an angry notion in the night. Then the idea had developed as a suitable punishment for his abandonment. By dawn it was an ambition so terrifying that it fascinated him. Now he was committed to it in his own mind, and the only way to keep his knees from knocking together was to keep moving. If his followers had protested now, he would have allowed himself to be persuaded. But he heard more pleased murmurs. There was more edible stuff, in quantity. But there were no ant–trails here, no sounds of foraging beetles. This was an area which Burl's tribesmen could clearly see was almost devoid of dangerous life. They seemed to brighten a little. This, they seemed to think, would be a good place to move to.

But Burl knew better. There were few ground–insects here because the area was hunted out. And Burl knew what had done the hunting.

He expected the others to realize where they were when they dodged around a clump of the new red puffballs and saw bald rock before them and a falling–away to emptiness beyond. Even then they could have retreated, but it did not enter their heads that Burl could do anything like this.

They didn't know where they were until Burl held up his hand for silence almost at the edge of the rock–knob which rose a hundred feet sheer, curving out a little near its top. They looked out uncomprehendingly at the mist–filled air and the nightmare landscape fading into its grayness. A tiny spider, the very youngest of hatchlings and barely four inches across, stealthily stalked another vastly smaller mite. The other was the many–legged larva of the oil–beetle. The larva itself had been called—on other planets by other men—the bee–louse. It could easily hide in the thick furl of a giant bumble–bee. But this one small creature never practiced that ability. The hatchling spider sprang and the small midge died. When the spider had grown and, being grown, spun a web, it would slay great crickets with the same insane ferocity.

Burl's followers saw first this and then certain three–quarter–inch strands of dirty silk that came up over the edge of the precipice. As one man after another realized where he was, he trembled violently. Dor turned gray. Jon and Jak were paralyzed with horror. They couldn't run.

Seeing the others even more frightened than himself filled Burl with a wholly unwarranted courage. When he opened his mouth, they cringed. If he shouted then at least one, more likely several, of them would die.

And this was because some forty or fifty feet down the mould–speckled precipice hung a drab–white object nearly hemispherical, some six feet in its half–diameter. A number of little semi–circular doors were fixed about its sides like arches. Though each one seemed to be a doorway, only one would open.

The thing had been oddly beautiful at first glance. It was held fast to the inward–sloping stone by cables, one or two of which stretched down toward the ground. Others reached up over the precipice–edge to hold it fast. It was a most unusual engineering feat, yet something more than that: this was also an ogre's castle. Ghastly trophies were fastened to the outer walls and hung by silken cords below it. Here was the hind–leg of one of the smaller beetles, there the wing–case of a flying creature. Here a snail–shell—the snails of Earth would hardly have recognized their descendant—and there a boulder weighing forty pounds or more. The shrunken head–armor of a beetle, the fierce jaws of a cricket, the pitiful shreds of dozens of creatures—all had once provided meals for the monster in the castle. And dangling by the longest cord of all was the shrunken, shriveled body of a long–dead man.

Burl glared at his tribesmen, clamping his jaws tight lest they chatter. He knew, as did the others, that any noise would bring the clotho spider swinging up its anchor–cables to the cliff–top. The men didn't dare move. But every one of them—and Burl was among the foremost—knew that inside the half–dome of gruesome relics the monster reposed in luxury and ease. It had eight furry, attenuated legs and a face that was a mask of horror. The eyes glittered malevolently above needle–sharp mandibles. It was a hunting–spider. At any moment it might leave the charnel–house in which it lived to stalk and pursue prey.

Burl motioned the others forward. He led one of them to the end of a cable where it curled up over the edge for an anchorage. He ripped the end free—and his flesh crawled as he did so. He found a boulder and knotted the end of the cable about it. In a whisper that imitated a spider's ferocity, Burl gave the man orders. He plucked a second quaking tribesman by the arm. With the jerky, uncontrolled movements of a robot, Dor allowed himself to be led to a second cable.

Burl commanded in a frenzy. He worked with stiff fingers and a dry throat, not knowing how he could do this thing. He had formed a plan in anger which he somehow was carrying out in a panic. Although his followers were as responsive as dead men, they obeyed him because they felt like dead men, unable to resist. After all, it was simple enough. There were boulders at the top of the precipice and silken cables hung taut over the edge. As Burl fastened a heavy boulder to each cable he could find, he loosened the silken strand until it hung tight only at the very edge of the more–than–vertical fall.

He took his post—and his followers gazed at him with the despairing eyes of zombies—and made a violent, urgent gesture. One man dumped his boulder over the precipice's edge. Burl cried out shrilly to the others, half–mad with his own terror. There was a ripping sound. The other men dumped their boulders over, fleeing with the movement—the paralysis of horror relieved by that one bit of exertion.

Burl could not flee. He panted and gasped, but he had to see. He stared down the dizzy wall. Boulders ripped and tore their way down the cliff–wall, pulling the cables loose from the face of the precipice. They shot out into space and jerked violently at the half–globular nest, ripping it loose from its anchorage.

Burl cried out exultantly. And as he cried out the shout became a bubbling sound; for although the ogre's silken castle did swing clear, it did not drop the sixty feet to the hard ground below. There was one cable Burl had missed, hidden by rock–tripe and mould in a depressed part of the cliff–top. The spider's house was dangling crazily by that one strand, bobbing erratically to and fro in mid–air.

And there was a convulsive struggle inside it. One of the arch–doors opened and the spider emerged. It was doubtless confused, but spiders simply do not know terror. Their one response to the unusual is ferocity. There was still one cable leading up the cliff–face—the thing's normal climbing–rope to its hunting–ground above. The spider leaped for this single cable. Its legs grasped the cord. It swarmed upward, poison fangs unsheathed, mandibles clashing in rage. The shaggy hair of its body seemed to bristle with insane ferocity. The skinny articulated legs fairly twinkled as it rose. It made slavering noises, unspeakably horrifying.

Burl's followers were already in panic–stricken flight. He could hear them crashing through obstacles as they ran glassy–eyed from the horror they only imagined, but which Burl could not but encounter. Burl shivered, his body poised for equally frenzied but quite hopeless flight. But his first step was blocked. There was a boulder behind him, standing on end, reaching up to his knee. He could not take the first step without dodging it.

It was not the Burl of the terror–filled childhood who acted then. It was the throw–back, the atavism to a bolder ancestry. While the Burl who was a product of his environment was able to know only the stunned sensations of purest panic, the other Burl acted on a sounder basis of desperation. The emerging normal human seized the upright boulder. He staggered to the rock–face with it. He dumped it down the line of the descending cable.

Humans do have ancestral behavior–patterns built into their nervous systems. A frightened small child does not flee; it swarms up the nearest adult to be carried away from danger. At ten a child does not climb but runs. And there is an age when it is normal for a man to stand at bay. This last instinct can be conditioned away. In Burl's fellows and his immediate forbears it had been. But things had happened to Burl to break that conditioning.

He flung the pointed boulder down. For the fraction of a second he heard only the bubbling, gnashing sounds the spider made as it climbed toward him. Then there was a quite indescribable cushioned impact. After that, there were seconds in which Burl heard nothing whatever—and then a noise which could not be described either, but was the impact of the spider's body on the ground a hundred feet below, together with the pointed boulder it had fought insanely during all its fall. And the boulder was on top. The noise was sickening.

Burl found himself shaking all over. His every muscle was tense and strained. But the spider did not crawl over the edge of the precipice and something had hit far below.

A long minute later he managed to look.

The nest still dangled at the end of the single cable, festooned with its gruesome trophies. But Burl saw the spider. It was, of course, characteristically tenacious of life. Its legs writhed and kicked, but the body was crushed and mangled.

As Burl stared down, trying to breathe again, an ant drew near the shattered creature. It stridulated. Other ants came. They hovered restlessly at the edge of the death–scene. One loathesome leg did not quiver. An ant moved in on it.

The ants began to tear the dead spider apart, carrying its fragments to their city a mile away.

Up on the cliff–top Burl got unsteadily to his feet and found that he could breathe. He was drenched in sweat, but the shock of triumph was as overwhelming as any of the terrors felt by ancestors on this planet.

On no other planet in the Galaxy could any human experience such triumph as Burl felt now because never before had human beings been so completely subjugated by their environment. On no other planet had such an environment existed, with humans flung so helplessly upon its mercy.

Burl had been normal among his fellows when he was as frightened and furtive as they. Now he had been given shock treatment by fate. He was very close to normal for a human being newly come to the forgotten planet, save that he had the detailed information which would enable a normal man to cope with the nightmare environment. What he lacked now was the habit.

But it would be intolerable for him to return to his former state of mind.

He walked almost thoughtfully after his fled followers. And he was still a savage in that he was remarkably matter–of–fact. He paused to break off a huge piece of the edible golden mushrooms his fellow–men had noticed on the way up. Lugging it easily, he went back down over the ground that had looked so astonishingly free of inimical life—which it was because of the spider that had used it as a hunting–preserve.

Burl began to see that it was not satisfactory to be one of a tribe of men who ran away all the time. If one man with a spear or stone could kill spiders, it was ridiculous for half a dozen men to run away and leave that one man the job alone. It made the job harder.

It occurred to Burl that he had killed ants without thinking too much about it, but nobody else had. Individual ants could be killed. If he got his followers to kill foot–long ants, they might in time battle the smaller, two–foot beetles. If they came to dare so much, they might attack greater creatures and ultimately attempt to resist the real predators.

Not clearly but very dimly, the Burl who had been shocked back to the viewpoint which was normal to the race of men saw that human beings could be more than the fugitive vermin on which other creatures preyed. It was not easy to envision, but he found it impossible to imagine sinking back to his former state. As a practical matter, if he was to remain as leader his tribesmen would have to change.

It was a long time before he reached the neighborhood of the hiding–place of which he had not been told the night before. He sniffed and listened. Presently he heard faint, murmurous noises. He traced them, hearing clearly the sound of hushed weeping and excited, timid chattering. He heard old Tama shrilly bewailing fate and the stupidity of Burl in getting himself killed.

He pushed boldly through the toadstool–growth and found his tribe all gathered together and trembling. They were shaken. They chattered together—not discussing or planning, but nervously recalling the terrifying experience they had gone through.

Burl stepped through the screen of fungi and men gaped at him. Then they leaped up to flee, thinking he might be pursued. Tet and Dik babbled shrilly. Burl cuffed them. It was an excellent thing for him to do. No man had struck another man in Burl's memory. Cuffings were reserved for children. But Burl cuffed the men who had fled from the cliff–edge. And because they had not been through Burl's experiences, they took the cuffings like children.

He took Jon and Jak by the ear and heaved them out of the hiding–place. He followed them, and then drove them to where they could see the base of the cliff from whose top they had tumbled stones—and then run away. He showed them the carcass of the spider, now being carted away piecemeal by ants. He told them angrily how it had been killed.

They looked at him fearfully.

He was exasperated. He scowled at them. And then he saw them shifting uneasily. There were clickings. A single, foraging black ant—rather large, quite sixteen inches long—moved into view. It seemed to be wandering purposelessly, but was actually seeking carrion to take back to its fellows. It moved toward the men. They were alive, therefore, it did not think of them as food—though it could regard them as enemies.

Burl moved forward and struck with his club. It was butchery. It was unprecedented. When the creature lay still he commanded one of his typo for followers to take it up. Inside its armored legs there would be meat. He mentioned the fact, pungently. Their faces expressed amazed wonderment.

There was another clicking. Another solitary ant. Burl handed his club to Dor, pushing him forward. Dor hesitated. Though he was not afraid of one wandering ant, he held back uneasily. Burl barked at him.

Dor struck clumsily and botched the job. Burl had to use his spear to finish it. But a second bit of prey lay before the men.

Then, quite suddenly, this completely unprecedented form of foraging became understandable to Burl's followers. Jak giggled nervously.

An hour later Burl led them back to the tribe's hiding–place. The others had been terror–stricken, not knowing where the men had gone. But their terror changed to mute amazement when the men carried huge quantities of meat and edible mushroom into the hiding–place. The tribe held what amounted to a banquet.

Dik and Tet swaggered under a burden of ant–carcass. This was not, of course, in any way revolting. Back on Earth, even thousands of years before, Arabs had eaten locusts cooked in butter and salted. All men had eaten crabs and other crustaceans, whose feeding habits were similar to those of ants. If Burl and his tribesmen had thought to be fastidious, ants on the forgotten planet would still have been considered edible, since they had not lost the habits of extreme cleanliness which made them notable on Earth.

This feast of all the tribe, in which men had brought back not only mushroom to be eaten, but actual prey—small prey—of their hunting, was very probably the first such occasion in at least thirty generations of the forty–odd since the planet's unintended colonization. Like the other events, which began with Burl trying to spear a fish with a rhinoceros–beetle's horn, it was not only novel, on that world, but would in time have almost incredibly far–reaching consequences. Perhaps the most significant thing about it was its timing. It came at very nearly the latest instant at which it could have done any good.

There was a reason which nobody in the tribe would ever remember to associate with the significance of this banquet. A long time before—months in terms of Earth–time—there had been a strong breeze that blew for three days and nights. It was an extremely unusual windstorm. It had seemed the stranger, then, because during all its duration everyone in the tribe had been sick, suffering continuously. When the windstorm had ended, the suffering ceased. A long time passed and nobody remembered it any longer.

There was no reason why they should. Yet, since that time there had been a new kind of thing growing among the innumerable moulds and rusts and toadstools of the lowlands. Burl had seen them on his travels, and the expeditionary force against the clotho spider had seen them on the journey up to the cliff–edge. Red puffballs, developing first underground, were now pushing the soil aside to expose taut, crimson parchment spheres to the open air. The tribesmen left them alone because they were strange; and strange things were always dangerous. Puffballs they were familiar with—big, misshapen things which shot at a touch a powder into the air. The particles of powder were spores—the seed from which they grew. Spores had remained infinitely small even on the forgotten planet where fungi grew huge. Only their capacity for growth had increased. The red growths were puffballs, but of a new and different kind.

As the tribe ate and admired, the hunters boasting of their courage, one of the new red mushrooms reached maturity.

This particular growing thing was perhaps two feet across, its main part spherical. Almost eighteen inches of the thing rose above–ground. A tawny and menacing red, the sphere was contained in a parchment–like skin that was pulled taut. There was internal tension. But the skin was tough and would not yield, yet the inexorable pressure of life within demanded that it stretch. It was growing within, but the skin without had ceased to grow.

This one happened to be on a low hillside a good half–mile from the place where Burl and his fellows banqueted. Its tough, red parchment skin was tensed unendurably. Suddenly it ripped apart with an explosive tearing noise. The dry spores within billowed out and up like the smoke of a shell–explosion, spurting skyward for twenty feet and more. At the top of their ascent they spread out and eddied like a cloud of reddish smoke. They hung in the air. They drifted in the sluggish breeze. They spread as they floated, forming a gradually extending, descending dust–cloud in the humid air.

A bee, flying back toward its hive, droned into the thin mass of dust. It was preoccupied. The dust–cloud was not opaque, but only a thick haze. The bee flew into it.

For half a dozen wing–beats nothing happened. Then the bee veered sharply. Its deep–toned humming rose in pitch. It made convulsive movements in mid–air. It lost balance and crashed heavily to the ground. There its legs kicked and heaved violently but without purpose. The wings beat furiously but without rhythm or effect. Its body bent in paroxysmic flexings. It stung blindly at nothing.

After a little while the bee died. Like all insects, bees breathe through spiracles—breathing–holes in their abdomens. This bee had flown into the cloud of red dust which was the spore–cloud of the new mushrooms.

The cloud drifted slowly along over the surface of yeasts and moulds, over toadstools and variegated fungus monstrosities. It moved steadily over a group of ants at work upon some bit of edible stuff. They were seized with an affliction like that of the bee. They writhed, moved convulsively. Their legs thrashed about. They died.

The cloud of red dust settled as it moved. By the time it had travelled a quarter–mile, it had almost all settled to the ground.

But a half–mile away there was another skyward–spurting uprush of red dust which spread slowly with the breeze. A quarter–mile away another plumed into the air. Farther on, two of them spouted their spores toward the clouds almost together.

Living things that breathed the red dust writhed and died. And the red–dust puffballs were scattered everywhere.

Burl and his tribesmen feasted, chattering in hushed tones of the remarkable fact that men ate meat of their own killing.