This time he was more covert. He knew how to hide. He kept away from the hunting parties and he knew much more about Jotok manners. He stalked the wild Jotoki up in the trees and they hunted him when he wasn’t looking. He studied Jotok anatomy for lack of anything else to do—the lungs on the inner arm that fed the heart and doubled as a singsong voice, the strange-tasting brain tissue that grew in a cortex around the heart, the leaf-grinding teeth in the undermouth that made great spearheads when sharpened.
Eater-of-Grass built three hidden lairs. He pretended he was an ancient kzin, before language or iron or gunpowder, spraying and defending his territory. According to the Conservors that was the era when kzin fathers often ate their sons to keep down the competition. Wryly, he wondered how different it was today. Then a kzinrret hid her children and defended them fiercely. Kzinrretti still tried to be protective. He remembered his mother fondly—without her he would not be alive today.
When the lights came on one morning, green and yellow through the leaves, he lifted his ears to listen for kzin hunting parties but heard only insects and the fall of a branch. Broad leaves dumped their water. Swooping from one branch to another, a firg cackled every time it took to the air, visible because of the red scales down its back.
He sniffed—detecting no kzin smells—but he wasn’t alone. He could never pick up the scent of a Jotok, because of a Jotok’s ability to mimic any aroma, but a forest is full of clues. With nostrils flared, he was catching the tang of lush broken cells, sugar, acid, spice. The rind of the pop-spray. A Jotok was out there, eating fruit.
Yes—there he was, many eyes watching from a rocky ridge, one hand already around a branch ready to shoot himself up into the growth above, and far enough away to escape. Prey for today’s meal, perhaps. But the creature would be hard to track. Best to ignore him for now. But not totally.
Eater-of-Grass found a tree being garroted by a pop-spray vine and shimmied up the bark to tear off a bunch of ripe balls. The rind was tough but that meant nothing to a Jotok’s grinding molars. He placed the balls on a stump in sight of his prey and retreated far enough away to be out of fear’s range, trusting the animal’s natural curiosity to induce it to examine the offering.
He wasn’t quite sure how to spring a trap. This Jotok’s limbs had the bulk and shape of an adult, but the skin wore a youthful shine. The beast might still be too young to have intelligence, yet must be about the age at which its kind acquired (very quickly) kzinlike deductive powers, becoming both hard to catch and dangerous.
After eating the fruit-balls his prey didn’t move away. It sat on its mouth, watching him, elbows in the air. He approached and it retreated, he casually distanced himself and it followed—peculiar behavior for a wild Jotok. The animal was still there the next morning, much closer, sitting in the tree above him and watching.
He fed it again. “Some pop-spray for you, Long-Reach. Hai! Long-Reach!”
When he had retreated the required distance, it dashed to the ground to devour his offering, shoving the balls one at a time into its undermouth with a weird lateral chewing motion. All the while it stared at him with two eyes, focused one on the fruit, while the others jerkily kept a cautious watch on the neighborhood.
Then… “Long-Reach,” it imitated from a lung slit on one of the arms. “Long-Reach,” replied another arm.
Fan-like ears suddenly erect, the amazed kzin recognized what it was saying from his recent verbal exchanges with Jotok slaves. Its voices were musical, muting the hisses and gutturals of the Hero’s Tongue. He listened, fascinated, as the arms began to play with the words, chatting to themselves in harmony. “Long-Reach. Long-Reach. Long-Long-Long-Reach. Reach … Reach … Reach!”
It tittered, pleased with itself, shifted to the mockery of the chirping of various insects, then sat down to await the orange-yellow kzin’s response.
“Come here, Long-Reach,” he said in his most ingratiating manner. “Stupid animal, I want to eat you.”
“Want to eat you. Want to eat you,” it replied.
How remarkable, he thought. He had found a Jotok in transition. Jotok-Tender had told him that if he fed one of the beasts at this stage, it would follow him around and imitate him. The Jotok were very peculiar, indeed; children were not raised in a family, they had no household keep, no patriarch, no mothers, no brothers to terrorize them, no teachers, no discipline, no toys, no warrior games. They just grew up in the forest, and when an adult wanted a family he just took a trip to the forest, picked out a healthy youth who had managed to survive and took him home.
The transitional Jotok was “programmed” to bond to whoever adopted it. Unfortunately for the Jotok race, the transitional mind, having evolved on a planet where the Jotoki were the only intelligent life form, couldn’t easily differentiate between an adult Jotok and an adult kzin. Any intelligent parent sufficed. Thus they made excellent slaves.
Days later Long-Reach was still following him around, no longer afraid of its kzin parent at all. Astonishingly, it had acquired a vocabulary of more words than it could count on its five-times-five thumbs. He tried to remember himself as a small kit; certainly he had never learned the basics of the Hero’s Tongue in so short a time.
After catching a rodent to eat, and being astonished when Long-Reach promptly dashed off into the woods and came back with another rodent, he became challenged to find out how much he could teach the creature. Could it learn to use tools? He sharpened a stake with his knife and handed the blade to one of the
