"H. Beam Piper - First Cycle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

And some moved up into the woods above the marshes.

Gradually, over hundreds of thousands of years, the progeny of these last developed binocular vision and
forepaws with digitsтАФfour fingers of unequal length and a thick, short, opposing thumb. Their bodies
were covered with bright red fur; they looked, more than anything else, like cats with the limbs of
monkeys. They would eat anything, animal or vegetable. They learned to use sticks for digging out roots
and knocking down fruit. They would use long whip-like withes to kill low flying bat-birds and small
animals. A couple of them wielding the long withes could even discourage attacks by fairly large animals.
When cornered, they were vicious fighters, with nails and teeth but to escape the larger carnivora they
relied chiefly upon agility, and developed longer legs for running and jumping, proportionally smaller
torsos, and arms and hands more and more specialized for gathering food.

They were incredibly lecherous beasts; the males chased not only the females of their own species, but of
any other even remotely similar. On some of these, not too distantly related, they begot hybrids which
occasionally bred true and formed new subspecies; but the real importance of this sexual cath olicity was
the competitive development of sex-attraction characteristics among their own females. Instead of
passively awaiting the male, the female sought him out and flaunted her charms before him. Mating,
among these monkey-cats of Hetaira, was not a matter of coy seductionтАФit was a head-on collision.

This pattern led to a certain tolerance and absence of jealousy among the males; each was quite willing to
share his plural mates with another. Instead of the family, the social unit became the gangтАФa dozen or so
males and females, the sex ratio changing with circumstance, and the randomly-begotten offspring cared
for by all.

Such a gang was more than a match for any of the carnivora of Hetaira, and could pull down and kill any
but the very largest herbivores. They learned to use stones for hammers and choppers and
hand-weapons and missiles; they invented innumerable tricks of cooperative hunting and fighting, and
since cooperation demands communication, they slowly developed the rudiments of speech. They made
themselves feared; at the approach of one of their gangs, big meat-eaters that had hitherto been kings of
the forest learned to slink away, or they did not live to learn.

So, when one such gang of red-furred scamperers rounded a bend in a game-trail and found themselves
confronted by a big pink-and-maroon striped thing with vermillion jowl-tufts like Lord Dundreary
whiskers and a single sabre-fang at the apex of a V-shaped jaw, one of them picked up a stone and
threw it, hitting the tiger-thing in the face. Instead of fleeing, the beast roared in fury and charged. The
gang scattered quickly out of the way. The one directly in front of the animal jumped behind a small bush,
pulled it down, waited for an instant, and then released it. The bush lashed forward into the beast's face.
Another snatched a ten-foot length of dead branch and shoved it between the animal's front legs. Three
more jumped in to catch hold of the tiger-thing's tail; the others swarmed over it with stones and clubs.
There was a brief howling, writhing convulsion in the brush, and then the one who had released the bush
in the beast's face jumped in with a heavy stone raised in its two hands, and smashed in the thing's head.
The others stoned it frantically while it twitched on the ground, and kept stoning it for quite a while after it
had stopped twitching. Gradually they realized that the thing was really dead, and the stoning died off and
stopped.

Then they saw that their victory had come at a price. One of the females, who had rushed in with a sharp
stick when the others had caught the beast's tail, had been ripped from throat to belly by the back-raking
claws. The gang stood looking at her for a while, and then first one, then another of them turned and
began tearing gobbets of meat from the dead tiger-thing and stuffing them into their mouths.