H. Piper - Fuzzy Sapiens

There were seven goofers, now; rodent-looking things with dark gray fur, a foot and a half long and six inches high at the shoulder, all industriously tearing off bark and digging at the roots of young trees. No wonder the woods were so thin, around here; if there were any number of them it was a wonder there were any trees at all. He picked up a camera and aimed it, getting some shots of them.

“Something else figuring on getting some lunch here,” Jack said, sweeping the sky with his glasses. “Harpy, a couple of miles off. Ah, another one. We’ll stick around a while; we may have to help our friends out.”

The five Fuzzies at the edge of the brush stood waiting. The goofers hadn’t heard them, and were still tearing and chewing at the bark and digging at the roots. Then, having circled around, the other three burst out suddenly, hurling their stones and running forward with their clubs. One stone hit a goofer and knocked it down; instantly, one of the Fuzzies ran forward and brained it with his club. The other two rushed a second goofer, felling and dispatching it with their clubs. The other fleds, into the skirmish line on the other side. Two were hit with stones, and finished off on the ground. The others got away. The eight Fuzzies gathered in a clump, seemed to debate pursuit for a moment, and then abandoned the idea. They had four goofers, a half-goofer apiece. That was a good meal for them.

They dragged their game together and began tearing the carcasses apart, using teeth and fingers, helping one another dismember them, tearing off skin and pulling meat loose, using stones to break bones. Gerd kept his camera going, filming the feast.

“Our gang’s got better table manners,” he commented.

“Our gang have the knives we make for them. Beside, our gang mostly eats zatku, and they break off the manibles and make little lobster-picks out of them. They’re ahead of our gang in one way, though. The Fuzzies south of the Divide don’t hunt cooperatively,” Jack said.

The two dots in the sky were larger and closer; a third had appeared.

“We better do something about that,” he advised, reaching for his rifle.

“Yes.” Jack put down the binoculars and secured his own rifle, checking it. “Let them eat as long as they can; they’ll get a big surprise in a minute or so.”

The Fuzzies seemed to be aware of the presence of the harpies. Maybe there were ultrasonic wing-vibration sounds they could hear; he couldn’t be sure, even with the hearing aid. There was so much ultrasonic noise in the woods, and he hadn’t learned, yet, to distinguish. The Fuzzies were eating more rapidly. Finally, one pointed and cried, “Gotza bizzo!” Gotza was another native zoological name he had learned, though the Fuzzies at Holloway’s Camp mostly said, “Hah’py,” now. The diners grabbed their weapons and what meat they could carry and dashed into the woods. One of the big pterodactyl-things was almost overhead, another was within a few hundred yards, and the third was coming in behind him. Jack sat up, put his left arm through his rifle-sling, cuddled the butt to his cheek and propped his elbows on his knees. The nearest harpy must have caught a movement in the brush below; it banked and started to dive. Jack’s 9.7 magnum bellowed. The harpy made a graceless flop-over in the air and dropped. The one behind banked quickly and tried to gain altitude; Gerd shot it. Jack’s rifle thundered again, and the third harpy thrashed leathery wings and dropped.

From below, there was silence, and then a clamor of Fuzzy voices:

“Harpies dead; what make do?”

“Thunder; maybe kill harpies! Maybe kill us next!”

“Bad place, this! Bizzo, fazzu!”

Roughly, fazzu meant, “Scram.”

Jack was laughing. “Little Fuzzy took it a lot calmer the first time he saw me shoot a harpy,” he said. “By that time, though, he’d seen so much he wasn’t surprised at anything.” He replaced the two fired rounds in the magazine of his rifle. “Well, bizzo, fazzu; we won’t get any more movies around here.”

They went around with the car, collecting the pickups they had planted, then lifted out, turning south toward the horizon-line of the Divide, the mountain range that stretched like the cross-stroke of an H between the West Coast Range and the Eastern Cordilleras. Evidently the Fuzzies never crossed it much; the language of the northern Fuzzies, while comprehensible, differed distinguishably from that spoken by the ones who had come in to the camp. Apparently the news of the bumper crop of zatku hadn’t gotten up here at all.

They talked about that, cruising south at five thousand feet, with the foothills of the Divide sliding away under them and the line of sheer mountains drawing closer. They’d have to establish a permanent camp up here; contact these Fuzzies and make friends with them, give them tools and weapons, learn about them.

That was, if the Native Commission budget would permit. They talked about that, too.

Then they argued about whether to stay up here for another few days, or start back to the camp.

“I think we’d better go back,” Jack said, somewhat regretfully. “We’ve been away for a week. I want to see what’s going on, now.”

“They’d screen us if anything was wrong.”

“I know. I still think we’d better go back. Let’s cross the Divide and camp somewhere on the other side, and go on in tomorrow morning.”

“Hokay; bizzo.” He swung the aircar left a trifle. “We’ll follow that river to the source and cross over there.”

The river came down through a wide valley, narrowing and growing more rapid as they ascended it. Finally, they came to where it emerged, a white mountain torrent, from the mouth of a canyon that cut into the main range of the Divide. He took the car down to within a few hundred feet and cut speed, entering the canyon. At first, it was wide, with a sandy beach on either side of the stream and trees back to the mountain face and up the steep talus at the foot of it. Granite at the bottom, and then weathered sandstone, and then, for a couple of hundred feet, gray, almost unweathered flint.

“Gerd,” Jack said, at length, “take her up a little, and get a little closer to the side of the canyon.” He shifted in his seat, and got his binoculars. “I want a close look at that.”

He wondered why, briefly. Then it struck him.

“You think that’s what I think it is?” he asked.

“Yeah. Sunstone-flint.” Jack didn’t seem particularly happy about it. “See that little bench, about halfway up? Set her down there. I’m going to take a look at that.”

The bench, little more than a wide ledge, was covered with thin soil; a few small trees and sparse brush grew on it. A sheer face of gray flint rose for a hundred feet above it. They had no blasting explosives, but there was a microray scanner and a small vibrohammer in the toolkit. They set the aircar down and went to work, cracking and scanning flint, and after two hours they had a couple of sunstones. They were nothing spectacular — an irregular globe seven or eight millimeters in diameter and a small elipsoid not quite twice as big. However, when Jack held them against the hot bowl of his pipe, they began to glow.

“What are they worth, Jack?”

“I don’t know. Some of these freelance gem-buyers would probably give as much as six or eight hundred for the big one. When the Company still had the monopoly, they’d have paid about four-fifty. Be worth twenty-five hundred on Terra. But look around. This layer’s three hundred feet thick; it runs all the way up the canyon, and probably for ten or fifteen miles along the mountain on either side.” He knocked out his pipe, blew through the stem, and pocketed it. “And it all belongs to the Fuzzies.”