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Gogol. He cocked his head, which made his resemblance to Leo all the
stronger. Say! Maybe you could find out what the difference is?
Maybe I could, I said, making it clear I would certainly look into the
problem.
But for now let s find those roos. I ll put Susan on soil and vegetation
samples as soon as she s done with sheep.
To my surprise, he frowned. Isn t she a little young& ?
When s your birthday? I asked him. When he told me, I said, Yeah, I guess
from your point of view she is a little young. You ve got two months on her.
Oops, said Janzen. Sorry.
No skin off my nose, I told him.
Leo grinned and slapped Janzen on the shoulder. Would be skin off his if
Susan had heard him, though. Rightly, too. Leo put an easy arm around
Janzen s shoulder. Susan s the one who developed the odders, Janz. You know,
the neo-otters that keep the canals around Torville free of clogweed?
Janzen looked rightly impressed. Good for Leo, I thought, rub it in just
enough so the lesson takes.
Besides, Leo said, if age had any bearing on who gets what job, Annie and I
would be sitting in the shade somewhere sipping mint juleps and fanning
ourselves.
Now, could we get on with this before we all, young and old alike, melt?
So we did. The strip of desert was wider than I d thought. We d need that
spring as much as the roos did. Of course, they were quite sensibly lying in
the shade
(drinking mint juleps, no doubt, whatever they were I d have to remember to
ask
Leo about that later), going nowhere until the cool of evening.
We d lost our specific roo (if we d ever had her) on the broad rocky flat that
lay between the strip of desert and the oasis. We paused in the first bit of
welcoming
shade.
Without a word, Leo signed the rest of us to wait while he moved further in to
scout the location of the mob without panicking it. I handed him the
cell-sampler. If he saw anything that looked like a rex, I wanted an instant
sample. I needed to know if more than one mother was breeding them.
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For a long while, it was quiet, except for the sound of running water and the
damned yakking of the chatterboxes. Every planet must have something like
this it s simply the noisiest creature in the EC. It keeps up a constant
racket unless something disturbs it. When the chatterboxes shut up, you know
you re in trouble.
Most people think the chatterboxes are birds, and that s good enough most
ways they fly, they lay eggs, what more could you ask of birds?
I, for one, prefer that my birds have feathers. Technically speaking, feathers
are required. The chatterboxes are a lot closer to lizards. I guess the
closest
Earth-authentic would be something like a pterodactyl, except that all the
pterodactyl reconstructions in ships files showed them brown or green. I
wonder what the paleontologists back on Earth would have made of ours.
The chatterboxes, besides being noisy, are the most vivid colors
imaginable blues and reds and purples and yellows and in some of the most
tasteless combinations you can imagine. They make most Mirabilan predators
violently ill, which shouldn t come as much of a surprise. The eggs are edible
though, and not just to
Mirabilan predators.
We watched and listened to the chatterboxes, thinking all the while, I m sure,
that we ought to bring home some eggs if we lucked onto a nest.
Then Leo was back.
He leaned close and spoke in a quiet voice. The chatterboxes kept right on.
Annie, I ve found the mob, but I didn t see anything that looked like a
rex nothing out of the ordinary at all. Just browsing kangaroos.
Chances are, mine is the first one, then. Do you think we can all get a look
without sending them in all directions?
Depends on your big feet.
Thanks, I told him.
The whole bunch of us headed out as quietly as we knew how. I d been worried
about Sangster, but she d obviously taken the kids training course to
heart she was as quiet as the rest of us.
We worked our way through sharpscrub, dent-de-lion, careless weed, spurts, and
stick-me-quick. It was mostly uphill. The terrain here was mostly rock with a
very slender capping of soil. Leo brushed past a stand of creve-coeur and
collected a shirtful of its nasty burrs, saving us all from a similar fate. I
didn t envy him the task of picking them out.
At last Leo stopped us. Kneeling, he slid forward, motioning me to follow. Our
faces inches apart, we peered through a small stand of lighten-me.
There was the tiny trickle of stream that fed this oasis. In the shade of the
surrounding trees lolled the mob of kangaroos, looking for the moment not so
much like a mob as like a picnic luncheon. There were perhaps twenty in clear
view, and not a striped hip among them. Still, that meant there were plenty
more we couldn t see.
It was also quite possible that the mother of our rex had been ostracized
because of her peculiar offspring. That happened often enough with Dragon s
Teeth.
Beside me there was an intake of breath. The chatterboxes paused momentarily,
then, to my relief, went right back to their chattering. Sangster pointed into
the sharpscrub to my left.
I caught just the quickest glimpse of stripes, followed it to the end of its
bound.
As it knelt on its forepaws to drink from the stream, I could see it had the
face and jaw of a red kangaroo, but the haunches were very faintly striped. I
nodded to her.
Good bet, that one. Different enough to be worth the first check.
Taking the cell-sampler back from Leo, I backed up still on my hands and
knees and skinned around to get as close as I could. (Skinned being the
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operative word in that EC. My palms would never be the same.) Just at that
moment, two of the adolescents started a kicking match.
Their timing was perfect. I took advantage of the distraction, rose, tiptoed
forward, and potted Striped Rump with the sampler. It twitched and looked
around but wasn t in the least alarmed. All it did was lean back on its tail
and scratch the area with a forepaw, for all the world like a human slob.
Very slowly, I reeled in the sample. (I ve startled too many creatures reeling
in samples not to be aware of that problem.) Once I had it, I stashed it in my
pack, reloaded, and popped a second roo, this time a male all chest and
shoulders, a good seven-footer. If the rexes got that big, I would be awfully
hard put to convince anybody they should be kept.
Not that it looked menacing now. It was lying belly-up in the deep shade, with
its feet in the air. Just now, it looked like a stuffed toy some kid had
dropped.
I knew better: Mike had gotten into an altercation with a red that size once,
and it had taken 341 stitches to repair the damage.
Roos use their claws to dig for edible roots. They panic, those claws ll do
just as efficient a job digging holes in your face.
Two sampled. I figured the best thing to do was keep sampling as long as I
could. I got eleven more without incident. Then I almost walked into the
fourteenth.
Its head jerked up from the vie-sans-joie it and its joey were browsing. The
joey dived headfirst into mama s pouch.
I knew it was all over, so I shot the sampler at the mother point-blank, as
the joey somersaulted within her pouch to stare at me wide-eyed between its
own hind feet.
Mamma took off like a shot.
Next thing I knew, the chatterboxes were in the air, dead silent except for
the sound of their wings, and every kangaroo was bounding every which way.
Janzen and Leo were on their feet in the same moment, dragging Sangster to
hers as well. Less chance of being jumped on if the roos were stampeding away
from you. Leo bellowed at them, just to make sure.
Trouble is, you can t count on a roo to do anything but be the damn dumb
creature it is so three of them headed straight for Leo and company.
Janzen dived left. Still bellowing, Leo dived right. And there stood Sangster,
right in the middle, unable to pick a direction. She took one step left, a
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