These trees had been overrun by the black ones; their roots starved of water, and leaves robbed of sun by the taller, darker invaders.
Gazda gave a coughing bark, and stood upright to take a tentative swaggering step forward and then another, frightened, but dreadfully tempted to investigate the shadows that hung around the unusual wood—yet something held him back.
His arms hung stiff at his sides as he swung them, a cautious, almost silent growl was rumbling in his chest. He took another step, and then shrank with knees bent.
He’d had the sudden feeling that something was among the trees—something was in there watching him!
A snake? Leopard? Hyenas, perhaps?
The hair on Gazda’s head and neck prickled as he squatted on all fours before the thicket.
The shadowed trunks and twisted roots grew close together, and the big leaves cast a murky darkness that settled like a fog near the ground, obscuring much. It slid among the trees this haze, and crept into the open grass. The darkness was moving outward, slithering toward the night ape in undulating waves crested by a light green mist.
The fog caressed the withered blades of grass that edged the wood as it drifted closer.
Gazda glanced up quickly. Eyes in the trees? Had he seen eyes in there—watching him?
No! He jumped up to his full height, swinging his arms at his side and hooting worriedly. It must have been the sunlight falling from... Where? The leaves were too thick; the wood was dark within.
A flicker of light again, and then nothing.
Baring his fangs, Gazda bolstered his courage by snatching up some sticks and long tufts of grass before standing up to swing his arms and snap his teeth—glaring an angry challenge at the tall black trees.
The night ape barked at the shadows and the memory of things looking out, before he made a desperate charge toward the dark grove where he threw the sticks and grass at the creeping fog.
But he veered away at the last second moving stiff-legged toward Fur-nose’s lair, certain that he had had enough of the strange trees.
He barely glanced back as he ran, though his thoughts were fixed upon the wood if his eyes were not. Gazda’s heart pounded, and his breath came in gasps as the weird trees loomed large behind him and in his imagination.
The night ape consoled himself thinking that he would return to explore the black grove more closely in the future, for he did not have the time at present.
He still wanted to investigate the mysterious tree-nest before the other apes or his mother realized he was away.
Gazda was never watched very closely anymore—especially when the tribe was engaged in eating its favorites—and now that he was approaching adolescence, he was expected to recognize the jungle dangers on his own.
But his maturation made no difference to his mother. Eeda doted on him, and was prone to worrying if he was very long away from her sight.
The night ape growled at this parental constriction as he sprinted across the grass toward the vine-covered structure in the trees.
The area around it was scallop-shaped, and filled with a great mass of long grasses that was encroached upon by thick ferns growing out from the surrounding jungle wall and intermingling with the clustered bushes laden with the berries favored by the apes.
After his unsettling brush with the dark stand behind him, the large leaf-shrouded structure in the old trees was more curious than threatening; and he barely slowed to climb up the swollen trunks that formed a base for the structure.
Once atop this he cleared away creepers and tangled vines to expose a broad platform made from flat sheets of wood laid edge to edge. Most of the lair was covered so thickly by foliage that the night ape was forced to reach through it and use his fingertips to investigate what lay beneath the greenery.
There he felt a flat piece of flexible material, much reinforced, that rose up perpendicularly from the platform to form a wall. Feeling along this, he found another angling away and past that one, another.
Quickly tearing the clingy covering aside, he set his palms against the wall and found it was made of a strange pliant substance laid over hard angular shapes and cross-braced branches that formed an inner support structure and reminded the night ape of bones beneath flesh.
The green-stained skin was comprised of a fine lattice of interwoven hair-like threads. It was soft, despite its age and dampness, and smelled of mold and decay, but it gave him a pleasurable feeling when he placed his bare hands or feet against it.
Gazda turned from the structure, and looked back toward the line of trees that obscured the beach. From his vantage point, it was plain to see that the entire open space was slowly filling up with plant life as the jungle grew inward to overtake the grasses and fill every hole and shallow—except where the dark grove grew and covered a fan-shaped section of the rising southern slope. There the verdure was falling back as the sick, black trees spread out toward the jungle.
He grumbled and the hair on his neck prickled when he realized that the shadowy fog he’d seen before was still leaking out of the grove and into the long grass.
The night ape hooted worriedly as he turned to the tree-nest where he continued to feel the shapes beneath the overgrown leaves and vines. With broader gestures now, he touched its walls and overhanging roof until he envisioned the large almost circular shape of the lair.
This investigation he had supplemented with his powerful nose, for a scent had been playing at his subconscious that grew stronger as the tree-nest was exposed.
He dropped to all fours upon the platform and snuffled about the structure. An old odor still seeped from beneath the fronds and
