For Love of Mother-Not - Alan Dean Foster [81]
“Musk oil and blood,” Lauren explained as the skimmer gently touched down.
Up close, the herd was twice as impressive: a seething, rippling mass of shaggy black hair broken by isolated clumps of twisted, massive horns, it looked more like a landscape of hell than an assembly of temporarily inanimate herbivores. When Lauren killed the engine and popped open the cabin door, Flinx was assailed by a powerful odor and the steady sonority of the herd’s breathing. Earth humming, he thought.
Lauren had the dart rifle out and ready as they approached the herd on foot. Flinx followed her and tried to pretend that the black cliffs that towered over them were basalt and not flesh.
“There.” She pointed between a pair of slowly heaving bulks at a medium-sized animal. Picking her spot, she sighted the long barrel carefully before putting three darts behind the massive skull. The mare stirred, coughing once. Then the head, which had begun to rise, relaxed, slowly sinking back to the surface. Flinx and Lauren held their breath, but the slight activity had failed to rouse any of their target’s neighbors.
Lauren fearlessly strode between the two hulks that formed a living canyon and unslung her backpack next to the tranquilized mare. Before leaving the skimmer, she had extracted several objects from its stores. These she now methodically laid out in a row on the ground and set to work, Flinx watched with interest as knife and tools he didn’t recognize did their work.
One container filled rapidly with blood. A second filled more rapidly with a green crystalline liquid. Lauren’s face was screwed up like a knot, and as soon as the aroma of the green fluid reached Flinx, he knew why. The scent was as overpowering as anything his nostrils had ever encountered. Fortunately, the smell was not bad, merely overwhelming.
A loud, sharp grunt sounded from behind him. He turned, to find himself gazing in horrified fascination at a great crimson eye. An absurdly tiny black pupil floated in the center of that blood-red disk. Then the eyelid rolled like a curtain over the apparition. Flinx did not relax.
“Hurry up!” he called softly over his shoulder. “I think this one’s waking up.”
“We’re not finished here yet,” Louren replied, stoppering the second bottle and setting to work with a low-power laser. “I have to close both wounds first.”
“Let nature close them,” he urged her, keeping an eye on the orb that had fixed blankly on him. The eyelid rippled, and he feared that the next time it opened, it would likely be to full awareness.
“You know me better than that,” she said firmly. Flinx waited, screaming silently for her to hurry. Finally, she said, “That’s done. We can go.”
They hurried back through the bulwark of black hair. Flinx did not allow himself to relax until they sat once more inside the skimmer. He spent much of the time trying to soothe Pip; in response to its master’s worry, it had developed a nervous twitch.
Despite the tight seal, the miasma rising from the green bottle nearly choked him. There was no odor from the container of blood.
“The green is the oil,” she explained unnecessarily. “It’s the rutting season.”
“I can see what you have in mind to do with that,” Flinx told her, “but why the blood?”
“Released in the open air, the concentrated oil would be enough to interest the males of the herd. We need to do more than just interest them. We need to drive them a little crazy. The only way to do that is to convince them that a ready female is in danger. The herd’s females will respond to that, too.” She set to work with the skimmer’s simple store of chemicals.
“You ought to be around sometime when the males are awake and fighting,” she said to him as she mixed oil, blood, and various catalysts in a sealed container. Flinx was watching the herd anxiously. “The whole forest shakes. Even the tallest trees tremble. When two of the big males connect with those skulls and horns,