From—“Yunnan Ogres,” by Guillaume W. Das.
Pages 84-95, In The Occupation of Post-Plague Terran Habitats
by Large Predators, Maureen Boileau and Jauna C. Costas, eds.
University Press, A.C. 876.
The Sino-Tibetan imperial court is not what one ordinarily
thinks of as a habitat for large predators—except of course
predatory humans. However, at one time the emperor had a guard unit
consisting of large furry predators referred to by the court as
“yetis.” These are not the reputedly shy indigenous
animals once believed to reside in the upper forests of the
Himalayas. They are an extraterrestrial species brought to Earth
during the exploration decades of the. 21st century, and housed in
secure special habitats where they could be observed by students
and the public without being aware of it.
Because of their size and predatory, quasi-human appearance, in
vernacular Anglic they were dubbed “ogres.” We will so refer to them here, to
distinguish them from the indigenous yeti, real or mythical.
The sole extant source of scientific information on ogres is a
cube published by the Interstellar Zoological society in A.D. 2078,
and brought to New Home in the library of the colonist ship
Vicente Hidalgo.
Physical Description
In appearance, an ogre is a large erect humanoid with short
brown to occasionally rufous fur over the entire body including the
face—everywhere but the soles and palms. A slight crest of fur
extends along the midline of the skull above the forehead, down to
the end of the spinal column.
Ogres have five-digit hands and feet, including opposable thumbs
on the hands. The legs are quite humanoid and the feet quite long.
They run on the balls of the feet, and when sprinting lean well
forward, taking long strides. They jump remarkably well,
considering their weight.
The torso is very powerful, most notably the high and rather
narrow but otherwise human-like shoulders. The arms are long,
compared to human arms, with the forearms and hands especially
long. The upper arms are very thick and muscular, their grasp
ferocious. They can pull close and crush, or hold their victim for
biting or choking.
The claws on their feet are useful for traction. The claws on
their hands however, are vestigial, being little more than thick
fingernails. In hunting, the lack of effective claws on the hands
is largely made up for by an extremely powerful grip.
Their jaws are elongated into a short, blunt muzzle, and their
dangerous teeth are similar to those of gorillas. As in the
gorilla, the skull of the ogre has a well-developed sagittal crest
to which are anchored the thick jaw muscles that provide their
crushing bite.
Ogre Behavior on Their Home
World
On their home world, ogres were, and presumably still are pack
hunters, preying mostly on large herd animals. There, adult male
ogres average more than two meters tall and typically mass about
200 kilos. Females average somewhat smaller—150-180 kilos. Ogres
sprint much faster than humans, and even over middle distances are
considerably faster than human athletes. But they are not as fleet
as their prey animals. Their success derives from intelligent
teamwork in the hunt, and endurance over long distances. They are
more agile than might be expected, and extremely
strong—considerably stronger, pound for pound, than a competitive
human weight lifter.
While ogres use their innate speed and strength to bring down
prey, in defense of their “nursery grounds” against
other predators, they use crude but effective stone weapons.
Ogres are not scent hunters. Their sense of smell seems little
or no better than a healthy, alert, primitive human hunter’s
must have been in the Paleolithic. They have superior night vision,
and on the steppes and savannahs of their home world they often
hunt by night. However, night is intensely dark in their wild
terran environment, the forests of Upper Yunnan, and there they are
said to hunt almost solely by day.
Post-Plague Natural History of Ogres on
Earth
Most of their post-plague natural history on Earth is
conjectural, of course. The following reconstruction, based in part
on interviews with humans in the Sino-Tibetan Empire, seems quite
convincing, however. The IZS cube tells us that small ogre packs
were installed in several zoological parks. These included the
Kunming Zoological Park at Kunming, China, where the subtropical
montane climate was thought to be reasonably well suited to them.
Their park habitats were all, of course, quite secure against
breakouts. However, during the chaos and insanity that accompanied
the Great Death, someone at the park apparently opened their
habitat entry, releasing them. Otherwise the ogres would have
starved to death.
Initially on their release, they no doubt dwelt in and around
the city of Kunming, preying on domestic animals and the infrequent
human survivors of the plague. They probably increased rapidly at
first. The females begin to produce offspring between ages 9 and
11, biennial twins being the mode where conditions are sufficiently
favorable. Very soon they must have had to leave the city to find
sufficient food. For a time they probably did well preying on
livestock, but over the first few decades, forests would have
encroached more and more on the cleared land, while livestock would
have decreased. The ogres must have transferred their attention
increasingly to deer, wild pigs, etc, which must have flourished in
the young pioneer forests. Thus the ogres no doubt continued to
find reasonably good hunting until the dense young forests had
closed their canopies and darkened. Then the supply of large game
animals must have decreased markedly, and the ogre population would
have leveled off or even decreased.
There were additional reasons that ogres were not to prosper for
long in the Upper Yunnan region. Adapted to a much drier climate
and open, mostly sunny savannahs and steppes, the very humid forest
climate of the Yunnan Plateau proved unhealthy for them. Apparently
they had done well enough in the zoological park; it was open to
the sun, they had a heated refuge from the rain, and presumably
there was apparatus which dusted them occasionally with fungicides.
And of course they were well fed, with their food medicated as
necessary.
But in the dark, damp, Yunnan forests, ogres are subject to
chronic and sometimes acute fungal diseases of the skin,
especially of the genitals and toes. In the wild populations of
today, despite centuries of natural selection for resistant genes,
such fungi are particularly damaging to infants, who contract them
from the mother’s pudenda during birth. Such infants
frequently become blind. Too, jungle rot of the feet rather often
hobbles adolescent and adult hunters to a greater or lesser extent,
enough to hamper hunting and make them dangerously surly toward
other ogres.
Further, ogres had evolved in much more open country. They were
intelligent enough to modify their hunting methods to heavy forest,
but they could not modify their physical equipment. Genetically,
they were what they were. And in heavy forest, there was not a lot
of big game to eat, while monkeys and wildfowl were seldom within
reach. Furthermore, tigers and leopards began to wander in and
establish themselves, providing serious competition. No doubt they
sometimes even preyed on the ogres, though mostly they must have
learned not to.
Meanwhile the scattered human survivors had been multiplying
too, and learning to live effectively as hunter-gatherers and
gardeners. When ogres came into conflict with established humans,
no doubt the humans at first must have died and been eaten, or
moved out of the district, carrying reports of the ogres with them.
In time, however, the humans responded with spears, arrows, axes,
and swords.
Squads of well-armed and truculent humans patrolled the marches
of their settlements, and when ogres ravaged a hamlet, a force of
humans was likely to track them. Such punitive expeditions often
ended in the death of the ogre predators.
Presumably the ogres learned to fear humans. Certainly the
humans feared ogres. Stories of ogre savagery, told before
fireplaces, became a rich part of the folklore of southwestern
China.
From rather early in the post-plague era, humans skirmished with
humans from time to time, and not all the ravaging of Yunnan farm
settlements was by ogres or rogue tigers. Thus in time there came
to be organization and chiefs, and eventually kings and armies. And
between local wars, the early local “kings” sent
patrols out to hunt and kill ogres. Thus the ogres were forced back
into the rougher, more remote country, where wild populations
persist today in scattered small bands. A party of would-be heroes
can still make a name for themselves by going hunting in the wild
Hengduan Mountains and bringing back the scalps or hands of one or
more ogres. And more than a few would-be heroes have been killed or
even eaten in the attempt.
Domestication of the Ogre
In earlier times, when ogres existed in nearer proximity to
human settlements, ogre infants were sometimes captured and reared
through childhood. Thus not only their intelligence but their
trainability became known. It also became known that with puberty,
at about age nine or ten, these one-time winsome and interesting
baby ogres became surly and dangerous. They were almost invariably
killed then for safety reasons.
Ogres have a voice box and mobile lips, and as cubs are taught
to talk by older pack members. They are not articulate by human
standards, but wild ogres do have language of their own, and in the
Sino-Tibetan empire, juvenile domesticated ogres are taught to
speak functional Tibetan, being intelligent enough to grasp and
learn a foreign grammar. The structure of their voice apparatus,
particularly the elongate mouth, prevents the pronunciation of the
velar sounds. Thus they pronounce k and t as g as
d. The loose, mobile lips permit easy pronunciation of the
bi-labials, but the large canine teeth make mastery of the
voiceless labio-dental f difficult, and it is usually
pronounced as th.
Imperial Domestication &
Training
While still a young man, King Songtsan I extended the boundaries
of his family’s rule from the Gulf of Tonkin north to the
Yellow River, and eastward to its confluence with the Siang,
creating the first large Sino-Tibetan state of the post-plague era.
His eldest son, who would later become Songstan II and take the
title of emperor, knew of baby “yetis” being trained
like children. There were telepaths in the royal service, and it
seemed to the crown prince that ogres reared in proper
circumstances, with telepaths to monitor their minds and whatever
might be troubling them, could be trained to drill, stand guard,
and fight. And surely no other ruler in the world would have such a
guard force. How much he thought to depend on ogres for security is
not known, but certainly they’d make a impressive looking
royal guard unit.
Training did not go well at first, but well enough that the
project was continued. Actually the ogres proved more intelligent
than expected, but more intractable as well, from puberty on.
Handlers were killed and maimed, but royalty could always conscript
and train new handlers. Emperor Songtsan III was the first to have
an actual guard force of armed and drilled ogres. By that time the
ogres being worked with were the third generation born in
captivity. Their recent ancestors had been brought up under the
careful direction of telepaths, and given a ready-made and partly
factual “tradition.” The surliness and dangerous rages
characteristic of unconditioned adult ogres was reduced in the
guard to occasional moodiness, and during the rut, to truculence.
In the rutting season, they were therefore taken off duty and sent
to stud.
Ogres were healthier in the relatively dry climate at Miyun than
in Yunnan, despite the cold winters, against which they were warmly
dressed and housed.
The emperor Songtsan IV had an ogre guard force numbering
eighty. Its eight squad leaders had been bonded to him personally
as cubs, and beyond that, all eighty had been hypnotically
implanted in cub-hood with a command of loyalty to the
emperor . . .
From—“Yunnan Ogres,” by Guillaume W. Das.
Pages 84-95, In The Occupation of Post-Plague Terran Habitats
by Large Predators, Maureen Boileau and Jauna C. Costas, eds.
University Press, A.C. 876.
The Sino-Tibetan imperial court is not what one ordinarily
thinks of as a habitat for large predators—except of course
predatory humans. However, at one time the emperor had a guard unit
consisting of large furry predators referred to by the court as
“yetis.” These are not the reputedly shy indigenous
animals once believed to reside in the upper forests of the
Himalayas. They are an extraterrestrial species brought to Earth
during the exploration decades of the. 21st century, and housed in
secure special habitats where they could be observed by students
and the public without being aware of it.
Because of their size and predatory, quasi-human appearance, in
vernacular Anglic they were dubbed “ogres.” We will so refer to them here, to
distinguish them from the indigenous yeti, real or mythical.
The sole extant source of scientific information on ogres is a
cube published by the Interstellar Zoological society in A.D. 2078,
and brought to New Home in the library of the colonist ship
Vicente Hidalgo.
Physical Description
In appearance, an ogre is a large erect humanoid with short
brown to occasionally rufous fur over the entire body including the
face—everywhere but the soles and palms. A slight crest of fur
extends along the midline of the skull above the forehead, down to
the end of the spinal column.
Ogres have five-digit hands and feet, including opposable thumbs
on the hands. The legs are quite humanoid and the feet quite long.
They run on the balls of the feet, and when sprinting lean well
forward, taking long strides. They jump remarkably well,
considering their weight.
The torso is very powerful, most notably the high and rather
narrow but otherwise human-like shoulders. The arms are long,
compared to human arms, with the forearms and hands especially
long. The upper arms are very thick and muscular, their grasp
ferocious. They can pull close and crush, or hold their victim for
biting or choking.
The claws on their feet are useful for traction. The claws on
their hands however, are vestigial, being little more than thick
fingernails. In hunting, the lack of effective claws on the hands
is largely made up for by an extremely powerful grip.
Their jaws are elongated into a short, blunt muzzle, and their
dangerous teeth are similar to those of gorillas. As in the
gorilla, the skull of the ogre has a well-developed sagittal crest
to which are anchored the thick jaw muscles that provide their
crushing bite.
Ogre Behavior on Their Home
World
On their home world, ogres were, and presumably still are pack
hunters, preying mostly on large herd animals. There, adult male
ogres average more than two meters tall and typically mass about
200 kilos. Females average somewhat smaller—150-180 kilos. Ogres
sprint much faster than humans, and even over middle distances are
considerably faster than human athletes. But they are not as fleet
as their prey animals. Their success derives from intelligent
teamwork in the hunt, and endurance over long distances. They are
more agile than might be expected, and extremely
strong—considerably stronger, pound for pound, than a competitive
human weight lifter.
While ogres use their innate speed and strength to bring down
prey, in defense of their “nursery grounds” against
other predators, they use crude but effective stone weapons.
Ogres are not scent hunters. Their sense of smell seems little
or no better than a healthy, alert, primitive human hunter’s
must have been in the Paleolithic. They have superior night vision,
and on the steppes and savannahs of their home world they often
hunt by night. However, night is intensely dark in their wild
terran environment, the forests of Upper Yunnan, and there they are
said to hunt almost solely by day.
Post-Plague Natural History of Ogres on
Earth
Most of their post-plague natural history on Earth is
conjectural, of course. The following reconstruction, based in part
on interviews with humans in the Sino-Tibetan Empire, seems quite
convincing, however. The IZS cube tells us that small ogre packs
were installed in several zoological parks. These included the
Kunming Zoological Park at Kunming, China, where the subtropical
montane climate was thought to be reasonably well suited to them.
Their park habitats were all, of course, quite secure against
breakouts. However, during the chaos and insanity that accompanied
the Great Death, someone at the park apparently opened their
habitat entry, releasing them. Otherwise the ogres would have
starved to death.
Initially on their release, they no doubt dwelt in and around
the city of Kunming, preying on domestic animals and the infrequent
human survivors of the plague. They probably increased rapidly at
first. The females begin to produce offspring between ages 9 and
11, biennial twins being the mode where conditions are sufficiently
favorable. Very soon they must have had to leave the city to find
sufficient food. For a time they probably did well preying on
livestock, but over the first few decades, forests would have
encroached more and more on the cleared land, while livestock would
have decreased. The ogres must have transferred their attention
increasingly to deer, wild pigs, etc, which must have flourished in
the young pioneer forests. Thus the ogres no doubt continued to
find reasonably good hunting until the dense young forests had
closed their canopies and darkened. Then the supply of large game
animals must have decreased markedly, and the ogre population would
have leveled off or even decreased.
There were additional reasons that ogres were not to prosper for
long in the Upper Yunnan region. Adapted to a much drier climate
and open, mostly sunny savannahs and steppes, the very humid forest
climate of the Yunnan Plateau proved unhealthy for them. Apparently
they had done well enough in the zoological park; it was open to
the sun, they had a heated refuge from the rain, and presumably
there was apparatus which dusted them occasionally with fungicides.
And of course they were well fed, with their food medicated as
necessary.
But in the dark, damp, Yunnan forests, ogres are subject to
chronic and sometimes acute fungal diseases of the skin,
especially of the genitals and toes. In the wild populations of
today, despite centuries of natural selection for resistant genes,
such fungi are particularly damaging to infants, who contract them
from the mother’s pudenda during birth. Such infants
frequently become blind. Too, jungle rot of the feet rather often
hobbles adolescent and adult hunters to a greater or lesser extent,
enough to hamper hunting and make them dangerously surly toward
other ogres.
Further, ogres had evolved in much more open country. They were
intelligent enough to modify their hunting methods to heavy forest,
but they could not modify their physical equipment. Genetically,
they were what they were. And in heavy forest, there was not a lot
of big game to eat, while monkeys and wildfowl were seldom within
reach. Furthermore, tigers and leopards began to wander in and
establish themselves, providing serious competition. No doubt they
sometimes even preyed on the ogres, though mostly they must have
learned not to.
Meanwhile the scattered human survivors had been multiplying
too, and learning to live effectively as hunter-gatherers and
gardeners. When ogres came into conflict with established humans,
no doubt the humans at first must have died and been eaten, or
moved out of the district, carrying reports of the ogres with them.
In time, however, the humans responded with spears, arrows, axes,
and swords.
Squads of well-armed and truculent humans patrolled the marches
of their settlements, and when ogres ravaged a hamlet, a force of
humans was likely to track them. Such punitive expeditions often
ended in the death of the ogre predators.
Presumably the ogres learned to fear humans. Certainly the
humans feared ogres. Stories of ogre savagery, told before
fireplaces, became a rich part of the folklore of southwestern
China.
From rather early in the post-plague era, humans skirmished with
humans from time to time, and not all the ravaging of Yunnan farm
settlements was by ogres or rogue tigers. Thus in time there came
to be organization and chiefs, and eventually kings and armies. And
between local wars, the early local “kings” sent
patrols out to hunt and kill ogres. Thus the ogres were forced back
into the rougher, more remote country, where wild populations
persist today in scattered small bands. A party of would-be heroes
can still make a name for themselves by going hunting in the wild
Hengduan Mountains and bringing back the scalps or hands of one or
more ogres. And more than a few would-be heroes have been killed or
even eaten in the attempt.
Domestication of the Ogre
In earlier times, when ogres existed in nearer proximity to
human settlements, ogre infants were sometimes captured and reared
through childhood. Thus not only their intelligence but their
trainability became known. It also became known that with puberty,
at about age nine or ten, these one-time winsome and interesting
baby ogres became surly and dangerous. They were almost invariably
killed then for safety reasons.
Ogres have a voice box and mobile lips, and as cubs are taught
to talk by older pack members. They are not articulate by human
standards, but wild ogres do have language of their own, and in the
Sino-Tibetan empire, juvenile domesticated ogres are taught to
speak functional Tibetan, being intelligent enough to grasp and
learn a foreign grammar. The structure of their voice apparatus,
particularly the elongate mouth, prevents the pronunciation of the
velar sounds. Thus they pronounce k and t as g as
d. The loose, mobile lips permit easy pronunciation of the
bi-labials, but the large canine teeth make mastery of the
voiceless labio-dental f difficult, and it is usually
pronounced as th.
Imperial Domestication &
Training
While still a young man, King Songtsan I extended the boundaries
of his family’s rule from the Gulf of Tonkin north to the
Yellow River, and eastward to its confluence with the Siang,
creating the first large Sino-Tibetan state of the post-plague era.
His eldest son, who would later become Songstan II and take the
title of emperor, knew of baby “yetis” being trained
like children. There were telepaths in the royal service, and it
seemed to the crown prince that ogres reared in proper
circumstances, with telepaths to monitor their minds and whatever
might be troubling them, could be trained to drill, stand guard,
and fight. And surely no other ruler in the world would have such a
guard force. How much he thought to depend on ogres for security is
not known, but certainly they’d make a impressive looking
royal guard unit.
Training did not go well at first, but well enough that the
project was continued. Actually the ogres proved more intelligent
than expected, but more intractable as well, from puberty on.
Handlers were killed and maimed, but royalty could always conscript
and train new handlers. Emperor Songtsan III was the first to have
an actual guard force of armed and drilled ogres. By that time the
ogres being worked with were the third generation born in
captivity. Their recent ancestors had been brought up under the
careful direction of telepaths, and given a ready-made and partly
factual “tradition.” The surliness and dangerous rages
characteristic of unconditioned adult ogres was reduced in the
guard to occasional moodiness, and during the rut, to truculence.
In the rutting season, they were therefore taken off duty and sent
to stud.
Ogres were healthier in the relatively dry climate at Miyun than
in Yunnan, despite the cold winters, against which they were warmly
dressed and housed.
The emperor Songtsan IV had an ogre guard force numbering
eighty. Its eight squad leaders had been bonded to him personally
as cubs, and beyond that, all eighty had been hypnotically
implanted in cub-hood with a command of loyalty to the
emperor . . .