"Ardath Mayhar - Khi to Freedom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mayhar Ardath)

Once we were well up the bank, the Varlian stopped and looked back at
it. He seemed to go out of himself for a minute, and while that was
happening the babble in my head rose to a higher pitch. Concentrated, in
some way. And aimed at the blue snake, which promptly curled itself into
a circle, straightened with a flick, and lit out like a whipped puppy.
тАЬDid you do that?тАЭ I asked the Varlian, though I knew he couldnтАЩt
understand me. To my astonishment, he looked me in the eye, grinned,
and pointed in the direction in which we were headed. Then he moved his
hands, forming a shape between them.
It was identical to that one used by a spaceport drunk to describe the
girl that got awayтАж or didnтАЩt, depending on how drunk he is. There was a
burst of Varlian-talk, but I had no recorder to catch it with, then rerun it
at quarter-speed to find out what heтАЩd said. I remembered quite a lot of
Varlian, having met them on many worlds.
Anyway, I nodded, and we started off again. This time the green
creature watched as closely as I did. I suspected that a lifetime of travel
above the ground had made him a bit careless.
So we both saw the big red-brown beast as it rose out of a hole beneath
the roots of a giant tree. It came quietly, speedily, but we werenтАЩt there. As
if I had reverted to some long-forgotten Primate ancestor, I leaped for an
overhanging limb nearly as fast and as high as my companion did. We
swarmed up adjacent trees, my guide skipped over into mine, and we both
crouched there, taking wicked delight in throwing twigs and the heavy
oblong nuts down into the face of the four-legged creature below. It had a
mane like a lion, but its conformation was something that was not quite
dog. The muzzle was too short and broad to be akin to the canine, but the
teeth were those deadly white fangs that human instinct recognizes from
the aboriginal wolf.
As we straightened our backs, the thing gave a frustrated gruntтАФor
roar. It wasnтАЩt quite either, and I thought what a short way I had come,
evolution-wise, from my apelike ancestors. Throwing nuts, indeed!
Lime (IтАЩd decided that I had to call him something) had come to the
conclusion that even limited as I was, we simply must take to the trees. He
made this clear with sign-language and gave me a short lesson in swinging
from limb to limb, with a short aside on how to tell a sound branch from a
rotten one.
Given the choice between breaking my neck cleanly and being chewed
on by the set of teeth below, I was an attentive student. As the maned
creature pawed the treetrunk and grunted, I removed my boots, tied them
onto the back of my tunic with the straps, and stepped gingerly out onto
the long thin limb that Lime had crossed in one easy bound.
It was an unsteady journey, for the branch bobbed with my weight. I
finally sat and inched my way along it until I reached the point at which
there was a stout limb overhead, to which I gladly transferred myself.
Lime had watched anxiously, his hands twitching like those of a mother
who wants desperately to take some new task from the inept hands of her
child and do it herself. I fervently wished that he couldтАж but I made it
safely and scrambled across a webwork of heavy branches to a trunk.
When I stopped and looked back, it was a surprising distance from the
tree up which I had originally scrambled.