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"The kahamwoodoo, according to the stories told by the priests and by the grandmothers, is often accompanied by smaller beasts. These are of various kinds and travel on top of the great beast. When the great one kills, he is sometimes robbed by the smaller, though they dare not take too much. And he does not bother these fellow travelers unless he becomes too hungry or they a
They were lying on two leaves side by side and over which was a thick canopy of interlacing leaves and vines. Ever since the huge red sun had dropped into the slot of night, she had been particular about having a heavy cover of vegetation over them. She was especially cautious when they prepared a place to sleep. Ishmael had asked her why, and she had replied that there were a number of reasons. She described some of them, and he had trouble getting to sleep thereafter and staying asleep.
This was the second sleep for them that night. He awoke suddenly, feeling a dull pain in his neck. He knew at once that a creeper had inserted its hollow tooth into his jugular. Namalee had told him that the plants went into a semihibemation during the night, but that some awoke enough to search for a victim, just as a sleeping person, half-awake, feeling thirsty, may stumble to the bathroom to get a drink of water. Namalee had advised him that, if this happened, he should submit. It was better to lose some blood than to jerk the tooth free and so fully awaken the plant.
He had asked her why it mattered if the plant was denied its drink. She had replied that it was best to cooperate with the earth growths. She was vague about what might happen if he did not. All she knew was that she had been taught that one should always go along with the arrangement. It was true that a person could avoid the creepers, if one had not drunk the paralyzing water, but it was better to submit.
Ishmael, thinking of the endless miles of jungle through which they would have to travel before coming to the mountain city of Zalarapamtra, decided to submit. He lay with his eyes closed and imagined the drain of blood. The red fluid was oozing through tiny capillaries of the creeper into the body of the parent stem. And then --
He started as he heard a very faint whistling sound somewhere above him. Something bent the tops of the plants, and something shook the vegetation. The rustling he now heard was not the never-ending motion of the plants quivering to the movements of the earth. The rustling was heavier and more prolonged and undoubtedly caused by some great body.
He managed to turn slowly on his side and reach out and swing Namalee's hammock-leaf. The creeper extended itself to compensate for his motion and so leave its tooth in his vein.
Namalee awoke suddenly and sat up, but she did not say anything. Moonlight filtering through spaces here and there enabled him to make out her body as a dim shape, and she could see his hand clearly in a shaft of light. She rolled over to the edge of the leaf very slowly and whispered, "What is it?"
"I don't know," he said. "Something big is out there."
He pointed upward at an angle.
The tentacle, which was a dark gray and about an inch thick, was blindly probing. But it was coming closer, sniffing for heat. The shivaradoo was blind, like most of the predatory beasts that came out at night, but its sense of heat detection gave it eyes and it had a strange hearing sense that enabled it to pinpoint its victims.
Ishmael plucked the creeper's tooth from his vein, hoping that the forcible ejection would not result in heavy bleeding. He rolled over and eased himself down from the leaf while Namalee did the same from hers. They had to drop a few feet and so could not avoid making some noise. About four seconds later, he heard a sound as of air escaping from pressure, and something pierced a leaf by his shoulder.
Namalee made a strangling sound, and both dropped flat on their faces to the ground. There were about six or seven hisses, and the thud of several objects striking the hard skins of stems.
Immediately after, the two got to their hands and knees and crawled swiftly to a fallen plant with a diameter of two feet. They went over and behind this just in time to escape three more missiles.
Ishmael reached over the trunk and groped until he found a tiny arrow-like thing embedded in the semi-wood. It was a needle-pointed shaft of bone about two inches long and one-sixteenth thick with four featherish growths at the other end. He did not test the sharp end, since Namalee had told him that this was coated with a poison.
According to her, the shivaradoo had thirty tentacles, all hollow. The beast grew the bony missiles in its own body. When they were fully developed, they dropped out into a pouch on the underside of its pancake- thin, sixty-feet-diametered body. The shivaradoo plucked the missiles out of the pouch with one tentacle and inserted them into the ends of other hollow tentacles. When the shivaradoo was close enough to a victim, it expelled a missile with air forced from a bladder-like organ on the top of its body. The range was about sixty feet.
The shivaradoo, like most of the creatures of the air, had large bladders of lighter-than-air gas to buoy it. These grew on top of its body.
Ishmael reached over the fallen trunk again to get some more missiles, and he heard hisses, followed by the dancing of leaves through which shafts pierced and the faint thud of more striking into the plant. One had plunged in only an inch from his hand.
Hastily he pulled several out and, holding them carefully, crawled after Namalee.
"It will follow us until it finds usl" Namalee gasped. "And we can't do a thing!"
"You said it could be killed with its own poison?"
"That is what the old tales say!"
They increased their speed on their hands and knees as a crashing noise came from behind them.
"O, Zoomashmarta!" she said. "It's smashing the plants to get at us!"
"It can't come down too far!" he said. "Otherwise, it'll spear itself on the plants! Some of them have pretty sharp points, you know!"
An animal leaped out in front of their faces and caused them to cry out and stop. But it was only one of the kwishchangas, the ante
Ishmael could not see what had happened to it, but he supposed that a poisoned dart had killed it.
The jungle was a series of vast snappings and whippings as plants broke or, released of the weight of the passing monster, sprang back to their original positions.
"Zoomashmarta, help us! Zoomashmarta, help us!" Namalee whispered.
The jungle ahead of them was boiling out with life. A horde of the nine-inch-long cockroaches erupted and raced off in all directions. A family of the double-nosed beasts fled up a pole-like plant, each leaping off the end to a branch of a larger growth.
The two, without a word between them, leaped up at the same time and raced through the jungle. They stumbled and fell, helped each other up, and Ishmael dropped his missiles and did not have the time to look for them. But he did take Namalee's stone knife from her.
"What is it?" Ishmael said.
"It's lifted and is going slowly now," she said. "Listen!"
Ishmael forced his breathing to slow down and to become quieter by opening his mouth wide and drawing in air in large bagsful. He could make out a susurrus behind them, but it was difficult to hear it through the shrieks and crashings of the smaller animals.
"The shivaradoo has no wing-sails, if you will remember," Namalee said. "It travels by seizing the plants with its tentacles and pulling itself along just above the top of the jungle."