present with too great a hunger to permit this to occur.
As a sleen weakened, or the stimulus of the blood became too great, other animals, tortured by their own hunger, attacked it.
In less than an Ahn Imnak, to my amazement, left the half-constructed shelter, and, walking among gorged sleen, and feeding sleen, and dead sleen, went to the drift and began to carry blocks back to the shelter.
In a moment I went to help him. We passed, literally, within feet of savage snow sleen, and scarcely did they notice us.
Some fifteen or twenty sleen had been killed, all by other sleen in the pack. The remaining sleen had fed on these. Some still fed, pulling and tearing at the bones and exposed ventral cavities and limbs of the fallen sleen.
Several of the animals, gorged with meat, curled in the snow, in a white coil, and slept.
Imnak added the new blocks to the snow shelter and, with his snow knife, cut those blocks he needed to finish the low, domed structure. It does not take long to construct such a shelter, if the snow is appropriate. I do not think he had worked longer, altogether, than some forty or fifty minutes on it. With the snow knife, on the outside, he trimmed and shaped the dwelling, and filled in the chinks with snow. Inside Poalu had relit the lamp and was already melting snow for drinking water and setting a pot to boil, hanging from the cooking rack, for meat.
27
The Face In The Sky; The Codes; Imnak Will Take First Watch
We pressed on, further northward.
It had been four sleeps now since we had left the first snow shelter, where we had been threatened by the sleen pack. Each sleep we had again constructed such a shelter.
The reversion frenzy of our sleen had passed quickly, even by the time the first shelter had been constructed, but we had left it tied, loosening its jaws only to feed it, because of the presence of the wild sleen in the vicinity. After our sleep in the first shelter we had reconnoitered. The majority of the sleen pack had departed, filled with meat. Imnak had retrieved his knife, it having claimed no more victims. Some five sleen had lingered in the vicinity, nosing about the fur and gnawed bones of the fallen members of the pack. From a distance they had eyed us, balefully.
We had left the shelter and trekked northward, our sleen again in its traces. The five sleen had drifted with us, some half pasang or so away. We saw them from time to time. Their presence no longer excited our own sleen, as it had now passed through its reversion frenzy.
'What lazy animals those sleen are,' said Imnak. 'They are not even really hungry, but they are keeping us in mind. They should be out hunting snow bosk, or basking sea sleen, or burrowing and scratching inland for hibernating leems.'
'I suppose you are right,' I said.
'But look at them,' he said, righteously. 'There they are, right there. They should be ashamed of themselves.'
'Yes,' I said, 'they certainly should.'
'No self-respecting sleen follows a man like that,' he said.
'You are quite possibly correct,' I granted him. Though sleen were not fastidious, men were surely not their preferred prey.
'But there they are,' said Imnak.
'They certainly are,' I said.
'We must teach those lazy, greedy fellows a lesson,' he said.
'I doubt if we could get close enough to them to harm them,' I said. 'When they become sufficiently hungry, then they will come in.'
'But then they will be extremely dangerous,' said Imnak. 'And there are five of them.'
'True,' I said. It did not seem likely that we could sustain the attack of five snow sleen without a shelter. Instinctively such animals, when in packs, tend to circle and attack simultaneously from different directions. The shelter, incidentally, tends to confuse them. It is not a shape which releases their normal attack behaviors. The best that we could do, presumably, if caught in the open, would be to fight back to back, the girls, low, at our feet. Even then they might be dragged away from us. Our best chance, presumably, would be to have pack ice behind us.
Before we had slept that night, and after Imnak had constructed our shelter, he removed from the supplies several strips of supple baleen, whale bone, taken from the baleen whale, the bluish blunt fin, which we had killed before taking the black Hunjer whale. He had brought this with him from the permanent camp. Why I had not understood.
'What are you doing?' I asked him.
He worked in the light of the lamp.
'Watch,' he said.
He took a long strip of baleen, about fifteen inches in length, and, with his knife, sharpened both ends, wickedly sharp. He then, carefully, folded the baleen together, with S-type folds. Its suppleness permitted this, but it was undet great tension, of course, to spring straight again, resuming its original shape. He then tied the baleen, tensed as it was, together with some stout tabuk sinew. The sinew, of. course, held the baleen together, in effect fastening a stout spring into a powerfully compressed position. If the sinew should break I would not have wished to be near that fierce, compressed, stout strip of sharpened baleen.
'Put it away,' I said to Imnak.
Imnak made several of these objects. He then inserted them into several pieces of meat, one in each piece of meat.
He threw one of these pieces of meat, containing the compressed baleen, outside the shelter.
'Now, let us sleep,' he said.
'It is a horrifying thing you are doing, Imnak,' I said to him.
'Do you wish to live?' he asked.
'Yes,' I said.
'Then do not object,' he said. 'It is us or it is the sleen.'
I lay awake for a long time. Then, suddenly, piercing, horrifying, I heard the cry of the animal. The sinew had dissolved in its stomach.
'What is it?' cried Arlene.
'It is nothing,' I told her.
I then slept.
We pressed on, further northward.
No sleen now followed us. The first of the five sleen had been killed two sleeps ago, outside one of the shelters as it had prowled about. It had been eaten by the other four. Two of those animals, apparently satisfied with the meat, had then left our trail, turning their attention elsewhere. Two others had continued to follow us. Yesterday, one sleep ago, when we had begun to trek, Imnak had cast behind the sled, in our tracks, another of his pieces of meat, containing the compressed baleen. The more aggressive of the two animals which had been following us was the first upon the meat. It died an Ahn later, while still following us. The other animal, more timid, crouched beside it. It waited until the first animal no longer moved, before it began to feed. After we had awakened after our most recent sleep and hitched the sleen to the sled Imnak had thrown out yet another of the cruel pieces of meat. Some hours later, when we heard the startled pain squeal of the mortally wounded beast, Imnak turned about in his tracks.
'Hurry!' he said. 'It is meat!'
When we reached the animal it lay on the ice, Its eyes open, not moving. Its pain must have been excruciating. It did not resist our lances.
