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

All but one male, whose favorite mate she had been. He remained crouching beside her, clumsily trying to
rearrange the mangled viscera, to close the wound, to somehow arouse her from her endless sleep. Some
of the others left the feast to join him. One of the females, still chewing on a piece of tiger-thing flank, put
a furry arm over his furry shoulder and tried to comfort him. Tearing the meat with her teeth, she offered
him half of it. He sank his teeth into the bloody gobbet and chewed, at first mechanically and then with
relish. When they finally left the dead female beside the striped body of the beast, he was chewing on a
bone and walking beside the female who had comforted him. As he walked the memory of his dead mate
began to fade. He liked this female too, and his was not a level of mental activity capable of much
projection beyond the immediate.

But somewhere in the back of his mind there smouldered a murderous hatred for the big striped
tiger-things. The next time he encountered one, after some twenty sleepsтАФeach of which might have
been anywhere from six to twelve hours, broken by waking periods of fifteen to thirtyтАФhe snatched up
stones and began hurling them rapidly and accurately, gibbering in fury. The maroon-striped,
Dundreary-whiskered monster snorted in surprise and fled.

Everything fled or fell before the roving gangs. The whole forest was their playground; they hunted and
fed and romped through it for millennia. They might have stopped there, satisfied with the niche they had
carved out for themselves, but for one thing. These little red-furred gangsters had begun to think, and to
question, and to imagine.

Chapter Three

Upon Thalassa, too, the sun still spiralled up to zenith and back again; the seasons changed and recurred.
Forests invaded open grasslands, and grasslands spread after retreating forests. Families and bands of
families left the swamp and wandered into the uplands; sometimes other groups, trusting to the protection
of their tree-nests, were swept out to sea in the biennial floods, occasionally to survive as castaways
upon other shores. Race after race of these primordial humanoids appeared, wandered, vanished, left
their scattered monuments of chipped stone weapons and fire-blackened caves and kitchen-middens.

On the large, roughly triangular continent which would someday be called Gvarda, a race finally
appeared which had reached that point in the journey of physical evolution where they were ready to
proceed from rudimentary socialization to true cultural advancement. They were short and stocky, but
their feet were narrower and less pronouncedly webbed, and they could use their two-thumbed hands
with equal facility in either direction and possessed considerable flexibility in the elbow joint. The body
down had completely disappeared from their green-gray skins; there was still down on their heads,
blue-green to green in color. They had large eyes, wide, jutting noses, heavy prognathous jaws, and
pointed ears that could be moved independently.

The tree-nests of their ancestors had become tree-houses, flexibly but strongly built to withstand the high
winds following the hot seasons. They had learned to twist ropes of bark-fiber and plant-fiber and
rawhide and animal-gut, and to make cunning knots and lashings. They chipped stone expertly, making
hafted axes and hammers from the cores, and knives and awls and spear-points from the flakes. They
designed a wide variety of bone-tipped fish-spears. They learned to hollow out pirogues from logs, with
fire and the stone adze. They wove baskets, and made garments of downy skins.

They called themselves the Navva. As with primitive peoples everywhere, this simply meant "The
People."

At times, after the floods, small parties would go up the river in pirogues, to where the more open forests