Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [38]
“You can tell nothing here is used to being hunted,” Ersol whispered. “They aren’t taking anything fired in their direction personally.”
With another gesture from de Peugh, the men spread out and came toward the animals from five different angles. This time, when Ersol fired his arrow, it glanced off the flank of the curly-corn, which whinnied and began to run. The cat chased it, as if in a game. The men broke into a run, too.
Suddenly the curly-corn reared, his chest looming over Minkus. Now was the time to use the spear—or never. But the cat evaded Mooney’s dagger by springing straight across the shaft of Minkus’s spear, knocking it aside.
Minkus, who fancied himself no mean hand at springing himself, threw himself at the cat at precisely the same time as the other four men. The cat’s fur brushed his hands as his feet landed, tangling with eight other feet, and the lot of them plunged through the underbrush and down, down, bruisingly down into a deep, dark hole.
Landing on that part of himself best suited for abrupt seating, Minkus was showered with debris from above. Looking up, he saw the faces of the cat, its teeth bared in a wide grin, and the curly-corn, staring down at himself and his companions. Perhaps there was something to this anthropomorphism after all, he thought. He could have sworn that both animals wore expressions of profound satisfaction.
“I think I broke my jaw,” Mooney mumbled. Or that was what Minkus understood him to say. Mooney’s actual statement was obscured by what seemed to be the echo of his last word, distorted into “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”
After sending Liam and Seamus on to the other culling places, Sinead and the extra curlies turned back to where she’d last seen the cheechakos. It had started snowing in the time they took to make their plans, and a light coating of snow masked the lakeshore and its surroundings. She missed the spot at first, for there was no longer any clothing or weapons or any remains of the dead rabbits.
“I know I left ’em around here somewhere,” she said, dismounting and looking for signs that would enable her to start tracking the men. Brushing aside some of the snow, she uncovered the vestiges of sets of tracks, two sets leading away from the site and one leading back. There was also one clear set of the pawprints of a track-sized cat. She began calling, but her cries were not answered, and after trying to tell one broken bush from another, she gave up and decided to find Liam and Seamus instead and send Seamus back to Kilcoole for help while she and Liam, the best tracker of the three of them, continued to search.
Clodagh was beginning to realize why religious congregations were sometimes called “flocks.” The ones following her to the hot springs had less sense than sheep and were noisier than magpies.
They insisted on walking to the hot-springs cave barefoot, even though she warned them about the coo-berry brambles that still guarded the cave entrance from the unwary and uninvited. The coo-brambles had settled back into being ordinary weeds again, their extraordinary growth curtailed once the brambles had penetrated and removed all of the Petraseal and most of the people who had painted the sealant in four of the planet’s communion caves. The brambles had been cut back, poisoned, and burned, but there was still a thriving growth at the hot springs. You just had to know how to avoid it.
Clodagh did avoid it. But the newcomers insisted on walking straight through the brambles, and she had an awful time getting them loose again, finally having to resort to the little mist bottle of coo-repellent she had thankfully remembered to carry with her.
Then the newcomers wanted to enter the cave by prostrating themselves and crawling in like worms, but Clodagh pointed out that since the entrance was through the waterfall, they could drown that way, and really, truly, the planet didn’t care a bit how they came in as long as they didn’t have any Petraseal with them.
They did insist on groveling and kissing the cave floor the