For Love of Mother-Not - Alan Dean Foster [80]
A soft whisper reached him from the other sleeping bag. Black hair shuffled against itself. “Good night, Flinx.” She turned to smile briefly at him, lighting up the cabin, then turned over and became still.
“Good night,” he mumbled. The uncertain hand that was halfway out of his covering withdrew and clenched convulsively on the rim of the material.
Maybe this was best, he tried to tell himself. Adult though he believed himself to be, there were mysteries and passwords he was still unfamiliar with. Besides, there was that surge of pity and compassion he had detected in her. Admiring, reassuring, but not what he was hoping to feel from her. He wanted—had to have—something more than that.
The one thing he didn’t need was another mother.
Chapter Thirteen
He said nothing when they rose the next morning, downed a quick breakfast of concentrates, and lifted once again into the murky sky. The sun was not quite up, though its cloud-diffused light brightened the treetops. They had to find Lauren’s herd soon, he knew, because the skimmer’s charge was running low and so were their options. He did not know how much time Mother Mastiff had left before the source of fear he had detected in her came to meet her.
Perhaps they had been hindered by the absence of daylight, or perhaps they had simply passed by the place, but this time they found the herd in minutes. Below the hovering skimmer they saw a multitude of small hills the color of obsidian. Black hair rippled in the morning breeze, thick and meter-long. Where one of the hills shifted in deep sleep, there was a flash of red like a ruby lost in a coal heap as an eye momentarily opened and closed.
Flinx counted more than fifty adults. Scattered among them, were an equal number of adolescents and infants. All lay sprawled on their sides on the damp ground, shielded somewhat from the rain by the grove they had chosen as a resting place.
So these were the fabled Demichin Devilopes!—awesome and threatening even in their satiated sleep. Flinx’s gaze settled on one immense male snoring away between two towering hardwoods. He guessed its length at ten meters, its height when erect at close to six. Had it been standing, a tall man could have walked beneath its belly and barely—brushed the lower tips of the shaggy hair.
The downsloping, heavily muscled neck drooped from between a pair of immense humped shoulders to end in a nightmarish skull from which several horns protruded. Some Devilopes had as few as two horns, others as many as nine. The horns twisted and curled, though most ended by pointing forward; no two animals’ horns grew in exactly the same way. Bony plates flared slightly outward from the horns to protect the eyes.
The forelegs were longer than the hind—unusual for so massive a mammal. This extreme fore musculature allowed a Devilope to push over a fully grown tree. That explained the devastated trail that marked their eating period. A herd would strip a section of forest bare, pushing down the evergreens to get at the tender branches and needles, even pulling off and consuming the bark of the main boles.
The Devilopes shifted in their sleep, kicking tree-sized legs.
“They’ll sleep like this for days,” Lauren explained as they circled slowly above the herd. “Until they get hungry again or unless something disturbs them. They don’t even bother to post sentries. No predator in its right mind would attack a herd of sleeping Devilopes. There’s always the danger they’d wake up.”
Flinx stared at the ocean of Devilope. “What do we do with them?” Not to mention how, he thought.
“They can’t be tamed, and they can’t be driven,” Lauren told him, “but sometimes you can draw them. We have to find a young mare in heat. The season’s right.” Her fingers moved over the controls, and the skimmer started to drop.
“We’re going into that?” Flinx pointed toward the herd.
“Have to,” she said. “There’s no other way. It ought to be okay. They’re asleep and unafraid.”
“That’s more than I can say,” he muttered as the skimmer dipped