“Do you hunt hooders?” Jonas interjected.
By the amount of exposed ivory he guessed that was a hilarious question to ask.
Shardelle waved a hand as if to dismiss his question. “Why don’t you hunt gabbleducks?”
“They are protected.”
“Under Polity law, yes, but I thought your people had been allowed hunting rights to feed yourselves … within limits.”
Some unspoken signal passed between the dracomen, for the two bearers once again took up the pole.
“Wait! You have to give me something!” said Shardelle.
Jonas glanced at her, realizing by the tone of her voice how desperate she was to find answers about the gabbleducks. The dracomen began to move off.
“Please,” she said.
One of the dracoman children halted and gazed up at her.
“The meat is forbidden,” it lisped, licking out a black forked tongue. It glanced at Jonas.
“Except to hooders.” Then the child scampered off after the adults.
“Delphic, just like their creator,” said Jonas.
“There was probably a wealth of information there, if we could figure it out,” Shardelle replied. She peered down the slope to where a tricone about half a meter long had breached.
This creature consisted of three long cones joined like Pan pipes, each revealing in their mouths gelatinous nodular heads which extended sluglike to lift the creature up, then propel it narrow end first back down into the ground.
“We will,” said Jonas, turning back toward the ATV, “given time.”
They made love on the second night, slowly, leisurely, and most of the time Jonas remained in the tent with her while she slept. He did not have to do that, but she was glad he did.
“In the morning we should come upon your big friend,” he said at one point. “What do you intend?”
Shardelle grinned at him, suddenly unreasonably happy. “Well, I’d like to ask him what he and the rest of his kind have been talking about. Do you think he’ll tell me?”
He smiled. “You know there’s a kids’ interactive book you can find here. The technology is Polity stuff but the stories were created here-distortions of old Earth fairy tales. When I said to you it moves like a bear, I was thinking of one particular fairy tale: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but in this case the three bears were gabbleducks.”
“Your point?” Shardelle asked.
“Well, she crept into their house to try their food and their beds….”
“Yes, I know … and baby gabbleduck’s bed was just right….”
“It was,” said Jonas, “and baby gabbleduck thought Goldilocks just right when he ate her.”
“Is there a moral to this?”
“Just be careful. I don’t want to lose you now that I’m getting to know you.”
Frustration awaited in the morning with Rodol telling them to divert from their course.
Two hooders lay in their way. It would be too dangerous to approach the giant gabbleduck.
“They might attack it,” said Shardelle, half minded to ignore Rodol’s warning.
Jonas reached out and put a hand on her arm. “On the way back-I promise you.”
They passed through an area where the shore wind had blown fragments of dead flute grass inland and mounded it in drifts, then into an area clear of everything but new shoots.
Evening sunset revealed the sea and the beach. They spent the night inside the ATV, Shardelle bedding down on the floor. At sunrise they traveled the remaining kilometer to the edge of a cliff, and they soon located the dead hooder.
The dune across which the enormous creature was draped imparted a curve to its forward segments emphasizing its resemblance to a spinal column. Shardelle was reminded of ancient saurian exhibits in museums on Earth, and models and diagrams from the early years of the science of osteopathy. Its head was spoon-shaped, concave side down to the sand, its armor plates spreading in a radial pattern from the neck. Judging by the grooves leading down from the creature to the water’s edge, its first discoverers had dragged it up the beach. They must have used some aerial craft to do this, since there was no sign of any other track marks in the sand.
“Do you know how we can get down there?” she asked, tapping up an elevation overlay on her map screen. The ATV rested above the beach just back from a steep muddy cliff. All around them the ground was level and had been scoured of even dead flute grass by the wind.
After auging for a moment, Jonas replied, “Go right.”
Shardelle tracked elevation lines with her finger. “Yeah, I think I see it.”
They traveled along above the beach for a kilometer, but downhill with the cliff growing shorter as they traveled and eventually petering out. A steep slope brought them down onto the sand whereupon they traveled back below the cliff. The lower part of the cliff was jagged limestone. Shardelle looked up and saw burrows in the compacted soil above that, and many falls. Tricone shells were imbedded up there, and many more were shattered on the limestone.
Many of the soil makers had obviously not known when to stop and burrowed straight out of the soil to fall and smash themselves. When they eventually reached the hooder it seemed more like some rock formation than any beast, being over two meters wide and a hundred meters long.
Wind-blown sand had mounded around it. It seemed ancient: a dinosaur skeleton in the process of being revealed. She brought the ATV to a halt in the lee of the monster.
